When the author came to Villa Park High School in Orange County, California back in 1998, having just finished fourteen years in an East Los Angeles school, she expected to find communication technology already operative. It was just beginning at Bell High School where she had been, in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), with a Video…

A number of elements of scaffolding are identified that contribute to the operationalization of real world video production projects as authentic learning environments in which students can learn the intellectual television production skills necessary for working in the television industry. Three key elements are identified. Firstly projects must…

Today, with the influx of media production courses across the country, students can intimately experience the differences between acting for the stage and acting for the screen and learn to shape their performances for a two-dimensional image. Such a course in video and film acting was introduced at the University of Arkansas. Students enrolled…

A discussion of the need for television studies serves as an introduction to a set of six papers which describe or suggest programs for the study of television in connection with specific courses and/or at various educational levels: (1) Television Studies in the Primary School; (2) Suggested Programme for Television Studies within the English…

This handbook provides novice video production teachers with a basic course outline containing information, activities, and lessons for use with high school students in an introductory television course. The contents are divided into five major sections: (1) before class begins, (2) preproduction, (3) production, (4) postproduction, and (5) the…

To describe the development of an experiential learning program for mass communication students, this report presents the results of a year-long experiment designed to help students gain in professionalism by both managing a cable channel and producing programs for it. The first section of the report describes the experiment, which was the result…

A self-instructional approach used at Central Michigan University to teach basic broadcasting techniques to students in a basic production course is described in this paper. Separate sections discuss the following topics: (1) problems involved in attempting to provide large numbers of students with hands-on training in broadcast production; (2)…