These Owls have Something to hoot About

For some children at , the day begins earlier than others. While students head to the gym for a game or pick-up basketball and others grab some breakfast in the cafeteria, another group spends the early morning in a very different way.

In a small room in the corner of the school’s media center, five children produce the school’s daily morning broadcast. This is OWLTV. 

Guided by media specialist Shawn Hinger, an ever-changing group of children learns the basics of how to present and produce a short news and information program that is broadcast across the school.

“They get here in the morning and start preparing for that,” Hinger said. “Really, I’ve trained them to be totally in charge of it, I just come in and make sure they’re not goofing off too much.”

With their owl-themed mugs sitting on their desks in front of them, the children read from a script they’ve prepared from a teleprompter operated by another student. While the numbers of students involved in the broadcast are down from last year, Hinger says she has still seen lots of different faces getting involved.

Some 60 different kids have gone through the program, which involves a lot of training. “But it’s important for the students to have that buy-in, to think ‘I’m a part of this,’ to see somebody like them,” Hinger said. “To have more students involved makes it more interesting.”

Participants have been taught to use the camera and teleprompter, as well as the digital production trolley. This device transfers the production to a digital file, which is often displayed on the Clarke Middle School website.

The OWLTV production is just one reason the  Georgia Board of Education recently named the Clarke Middle School Media Center exemplary.

Another area in which the center won favor was the improvements made in educating students in digital and media literacy.  This includes teaching them how to use photographs and music in projects as well as copyright and other media regulation.

“I’ve really been pushing the digital literacy and digital writing,” Hinger said. “I think it’s hard to wrap the kids’ minds around ethically using images and media and video and music.”

The process of digital learning recently took the children outside of the media center to produce a project on Elizabethan England. The students travelled to both the nearby Athens-Clarke County Library and the UGA main library to use the resources offered locally to enhance their learning experience.

The students come back and create multi-genre research papers, citing their sources correctly, and they present to one another, Hinger said. The children then present to other classes of sixth and seventh graders and everybody learns about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare.

The presentations transform the media center into a scene of display boards and three dimensional structures and talking students explaining their work. Displaying the children’s projects is only one of the initiatives currently being used to involved parents in the facility.

“The parents are welcome here any time during the school day,” Hinger said. “We invite parents in to check out books and use the computers and to work in the library and just hang out.”

The involvement of the parents has been helped by the recent addition of a family resource room. It  serves as a base for the school’s family engagement specialist. The school is currently working towards installing computers in the family room to provide specialized facilities for the student’s family members.  Hinger hopes these developments will help encourage more parents to become involved in the center’s work.    

The achievement of being the only school in Georgia awarded an exemplary rating goes beyond Clarke Middle School, with the effects spreading into the Clarke County school district as a whole.

“Any time one of our schools gets state or national recognition, it helps the whole district,” said Denise Spangler, a member of the Clarke County Board of Education. “A lot of people, I think, have negative images of our school district because of our demographic--we do also have centers of excellence within the district that sometimes gets overlooked.”

Chantiele Harris has worked with Hinger at the media center for five years. She thinks the award should serve as inspiration for the media center to continue to improve on their achievement.

“I think we’ve been doing everything right all along,” Harris said. “I think we just continue to do what we been doing and that’s what makes us exemplary.”