SCHS Media Arts Showcase

As our Shelby County winter break begins, I wanted to highlight a special occasion that occurred last Thursday night, and in the process give Jacinta Newsome a #ShelbyTUITshoutout.  Her two Shelby County High School multimedia classes,  along with a few other Shelby County students, presented their multimedia work for the public.  I was flattered and excited to be a judge to help score student presentations, along with some other Shelby County colleagues: Ryan Allan (our district PR person and voice behind its social media), Julie Webb (LMS of SCHS), and Lee Louden (our network guru).  Kathie Wrightson, a SCHS teacher who got her own shoutout recently, also helped Jacinta in orchestrating the showcase.

Here would be a good point to give a hurrah to Matt Simons.  Resulting from a request from Jacinta for help, I reached out through a Kentucky tech leader listserv looking for tips and assistance on running a digital showcase.  Matt contacted me and generously offered his workplace facility Creative-Image Technologies as a host location for the showcase.  (C-IT is responsible for installing much of Shelby County's intelligent classroom edtech, as well as offering training sessions to our district personnel, as I wrote about in a previous post.)   It is a beautiful and modern environment to highlight student work, and we were very fortunate for the opportunity.

Each judge met with about ten students, who presented their work one at a time in a different room in C-IT. When they finished, judges and the audience were encouraged to ask questions; each judge was to assess the product and presentation using a rubric provided by Jacinta.  Her instructions were clear: hold the students and their work to a high standard, so the feedback would help them grow.

And the work was impressive.  Students presented everything from video games to digital magazines to music (in appropriately designed CD cases) to short films.  Here are some pictures of the evening taken by Gerald Tegarden, a Yearbook staff member at SCHS.

A screenshot of a video game created by Jaime Rosales (junior, SCHS).

Brenna Gargan (senior, SCHS) presents her digital literary magazine.

Morgan Allen (senior, SCHS; pictured on screen) filmed a documentary about "true beauty."

A certain judge/blog writer looks at a logo from Barby Womack (sophomore, SCHS). Her project was a film about love, cleverly interviewing and editing together the responses of four couples.

Of the work I judged, one of my favorites was a short film by Cole Ivey.  Not only did he compose the music, but Cole shot and edited the video.

Congratulations to all the students who presented work, demonstrating the passion, ambition, leadership, and creativity of Shelby County youth. Thanks again to Matt Simons and C-IT. And a tip of the hat to Jacinta Newsome for providing her students with an authentic learning experience!