Findings, interpretations, and prioritization:

We have already pushed our district to give us complete creative autonomy with our morning announcements. We have built our own green screen recording studio in our MakerSpace to give our announcements a professional feel. Our district has many schools producing live morning announcements but to be completely honest, they are mundane to say the least. Doing them live puts pressure on classroom teachers to be tuned in at a specific time which, as any teacher will tell you, is a difficult task any day of the week. Teachers can pull up our YouTube channel at their convenience. We are the only school publishing our morning announcements on YouTube (svviperpit). This has allowed us to connect with our parent community on Twitter, Facebook, and our school website. Because of this, parents feel connected to everything that is happening on our campus on a daily basis. When the pandemic hit, our morning announcements allowed us to connect not only with our students, but were also vital to parents to stay abreast of what was happening each and every day.

We had an extraordinary group of 25 students that took ownership and were always looking for ways to captivate our student audience. Oftentimes you could hear students talking about their favorite anchor and what they liked about them. The Arizona Diamondbacks and the University of Phoenix recognized all of their efforts and were blown away by what they were all accomplishing at such a young age. We were able to create a flawless student-run production company that was in charge of segment creation, lighting, green screening, sound quality, editing and uploading to YouTube. Our students are using multiple apps to produce each episode. Our students fine tune everything in iMovie which is a powerful film editing tool that is preparing our students to take creative control from a very young age. 

We have been publishing our morning announcements on YouTube for over four years now and we are up to 454 subscribers. It shows what students can do when they consistently produce a quality product that is engaging and inspiring.

We have hit the ground running and we have no plans of looking back when it comes to digital content creation at Sierra Verde. As they have accomplished all of this they have been learning the art of connecting people on a global scale and honing the art of storytelling with digital media tools.

As our kids promote to our feeder high school Mountain Ridge, they will be ready to take their skills to the next level and join the award-winning Career and Technical Education (CTE) program where they can continue honing their skills and begin to prepare for pathways and opportunities to use these skills in practical applications and set themselves up for potential careers in STEM related fields. It is our goal to create a pipeline of STEM educated learners prepared to excel in high school so our students can continue building upon the skills they developed during their time at Sierra Verde. 

Action:

In conclusion, we are highly committed to continuing the path of excellence with our students moving forward. Through podcasting, digital recording and editing, our focus on computer science and content creation overall, we are determined and excited to keep raising the bar with our students and what they are capable of achieving. If we continue to provide real-world opportunities for them to create with a purpose and a clear understanding to address and solve, then our students will be more than adequately prepared for what lies ahead of them in the future.