Learning & Leading Through Technology

Give Your Student News Program an Upgrade

A t Cornell High School, just outside of Pittsburgh, Penn- sylvania, a familiar tagline rings through the corridors to signal the start of the academic day: “We’ll see you in the halls.” Our CHS-TV news team of about a dozen students produces live video announcements each morning, complete with custom graphics, a weather report from outside the building, and even an occasional commercial.

School news teams are nothing new, of course. But what makes our project unique is that we built our studio on a budget, and our students own the broadcast. Students receive no academic credits for participating, and yet they are willing to give up their breakfast to put on the broadcast each day and devote countless hours to preparation. In return, they get a chance to hone digital age skills and get real-world experience.

Moving Our Studio into the Future

The project started 3½ years ago when
our technology education teacher, Lar-
ry DiSilvestro, and I set out to trans-
form Cornell’s lackluster broadcasting
club. The students were broadcasting
from the back of a classroom using
our school’s cable network and the old
TV sets we previously used to trans-
mit Channel One News, which is pre-
packaged programming for schools.
We had a steep hill to climb that
first year. Not only did we aim to im-
prove the overall production quality
and teach students to create some of
their own graphics and clips, but we
also wanted to modernize the tech-
nology. We had lots of aspirations
but no budget.

Fortunately, the timing was perfect for us. Thanks to a series of grants, each of our classrooms had a projector. I had set up our wireless network a couple years before and understood that it could handle the extra load that transmitting video requires. All I had to do was find a means of distributing the video to the classrooms and a tool that the students could use to live edit.

My research led me to a free open source solution to distribute the video across our LAN, Darwin Streaming Server (DSS). DSS receives a video feed from our studio and does

Thanks to a series of grants, Cornell High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was able to upgrade equipment in its TV studio.

One goal of the news program makeover was to teach students to create some of their own graphics and clips.

the heavy lifting of distributing that video feed to all the classrooms.

DSS is based on Apple’s Quicktime Streaming Server (QTSS) and works on Macs, PCs, and Linux. There are also plenty of paid alternatives, such as Wowza Media Server and Adobe Media Server. After doing some testing, DSS worked perfectly for us and our budget. I was able to put it on an existing server that I manage.

For the broadcasting software that the students use to add graphics, music, transitions, and switches between shots, we settled on Wirecast by Telestream. Wirecast has a strong reputation among internet broadcasters, and Telestream moderates an online forum of users who are willing to help others do everything from troubleshoot problems to select hardware.