30th April – 1st May 2009:
Anglia Ruskin University are committed to encouraging participation to University and have a dedicated ‘Widening Participation’ team who work across the East Anglia region with schools and colleges to show students first hand what university life is like by engaging prospective students in real University situations.
Hal MacLean and myself have worked with the widening participation department for many years, and continue our work under the Cleveratomflag. Read about some of the past projects we’ve done together last year, and here, here, here, here and here.
This year the Summer School project we worked together on took place over weeks and was titled ‘Broadcast Journalism’. The students were to be introduced to how media for journalism is created for broadcast, we undertook a similar project with different students last year.
Twenty five students were introduced to University life by Ian, his team, and current University students. Hal and myself also recalled our own studies at the University, before introducing them to what we had done around the world in this field, before inducting the students in film, animation, sound creation and broadcasting skills.
Once we had inducted the students to the technology we then mixed up the students into cross-school groups and challenged each group with a different activity:

• Group 1 – Make a factual news report about a current issue
• Group 2 – Make a news report in support of the issue
• Group 3 – Make a news report against the issue
• Group 4 – Make the idents for the news programme, present live links between content, interview someone live on air about the issue created by groups 1 and 2, broadcast the show live on the internet

The students were then told that on day two of the programme all content would be broadcasted live as a news programme on the internet, by them, at 3pm and all studio based recordings had to be live (not pre-recorded!).
Using Boinx TV running on the Apple platform for the broadcast, and iMovie, GarageBand, iStopMotion, iTunes, Photoshop and iPhoto to put together the material, the teams had to talk to each other. The students had little or no experience in the software used for the project.
Issue (created by groups) – Swine flu, a report on the outbreak of a global killer.

With a big challenge, and a strict deadline for broadcast students had to work together to form a broadcast production crew, delegate jobs and ensure the broadcast was no longer than five minutes. Students found natural roles, realised the urgency of deadlines and production needs and produced an excellent product.
Matthew Eaves, Hais Deakin, Alex Blanc and Hal MacLean from Cleveratom Ltd were on hand as experts for the event. Here is the final completed piece of work for the project, uploaded to Youtube:

Learners with Asperger’s Syndrome from City College Norwich award winning ‘Rugroom‘ were on hand to record the event as part of the Phonix Purple course at the College.  Here is their completed documentary about the project as reported on the Rugroom.tv youtube channel:

Some images from the event: