Who: Tom French’s seventh-grade class
What: Public service videos
Why: To raise awareness of cyber-bullying and encourage recycling

Just as passionate video pros like Travis Mathews (see p30) use Mac gear to produce video pieces that help bring about positive change, Tom French and his seventh-grade English students at J. William Leary Junior High in Massena, New York, are helping spread the word about issues such as cyber-bullying and the importance of recycling via public-service ads that the kids write and act in. French filmed the commercials with a high-definition video camera he purchased last year using grant money and edited them on a Mac Pro obtained with the same funding. Though he does most of his editing in iMovie, French says, he plans to step up to Final Cut Pro soon and has dabbled in Final Cut Express. French and his students have entered a variety of video-production contests aimed at schoolkids, and the PSA they produced last year has been aired on Massena’s local Fox News and CBS affiliates.

 

“I was shocked at how quickly they came up with really good ideas,” French says. “When school counselor Julie Kormanyos and I were talking about it, we knew it would be a lot of work, but we said, if we come up with one good idea we’ll run with it, and if we don’t come up with anything that’s do-able, we won’t do anything. We had more than one good idea—we had two or three—and we had to choose two.”

Kormanyos, whose aim is to help the teenage students a JW Leary deal with a range of social and emotional issues, says that she’s all for finding a way to do it that speaks to the kids using video, a medium they’re familiar with. “If we can find a way to get through to them by using technology, having them understand certain things happening in their teenage world, that’s the way we want to do it—through technology.”

French and his students film the cyber-bullying PSA. French says he wishes the students used Macs, but the school’s computer lab is PC-only.

For their part, three of French’s former students who worked on the cyber-bullying PSA in 2007, say they enjoyed the experience, even if they weren’t in the spotlight.

Michael Stenlake 13, who’s in eighth-grade this year, says that his role as an on-camera extra was more than just a seat-warmer. Since the class came up with their commercial story line concepts in small groups, they couldn’t really sit by and let their classmates do all the work. “It was kind of easy and kind of hard at the same time,” Stenlake remembers. “It was hard to think of something like, out of nothing, but once we got an idea it was easy to put it together because we were all working together.”

Sarah Tyo, also 13, says she loved the acting—and seeing herself on TV wasn’t bad, either. “It made me feel accomplished knowing I actually did it; the word was out now, warning people and trying to stop [cyber-bullying],” she says.

Besides spreading the word that “cyber-bullying can hurt anyone, not just the person being bullied,” says 13-year-old Stephen David, participating in the PSA project gave the students a newfound awareness of the process of writing and filming TV commercials. David’s least favorite aspect of the project was, he says, “having to do the same scene over and over again.”

“They had lots of takes,” says Kormanyos. For his part, French says a Mac lab with seven computers and a widescreen display attached to the Mac is all he needs to continue doing these projects. Kormanyos and French are already scouting other topics to cover in 2009. They’re thinking of starting with bullying—the old-school, non-Internet-based kind (think stolen lunch money). French has a keen sense of the influence of technology in his students’ lives, especially compared to a decade ago.

Back then, he says, “I felt I was ahead of the kids in terms of the technology curve, but as I’ve gotten older, I can definitely tell they’re probably ahead of me.”