Producing A PSA: A Collaborative Effort

For the past three weeks, I have been working collaboratively with three other individuals living in other parts of the state and country to produce a Public Service Announcement for Academic Honesty. Our group included two elementary teachers, a technology specialist in an elementary school, and a high school science teacher. In order to accomplish our goal, we used Google Docs to facilitate real-time communication and email to plan online meetings and send documents back and forth. In spite of time differences and hectic schedules, we were able to find the necessary time to plan, carry out tasks, offer feedback, troubleshoot problems, and complete our assignment on schedule.
Academic honesty is an important topic to all of us and we initially saw a lot of potential for showing how a child's concept of honesty and cheating changed as they progressed through their education from pre-K to high school graduation. We developed a core group of questions related to academic honesty and cheating and designed a plan to mix narration, student comments, and video to get our point across. As we shot video clips, located relevent video clips/images with creative commons license, recorded audio comments, and researched copyright/fair use rules everything seemed great. Our first difficulties arose as we tried to send files using a variety of formats. We encountered difficulties accessing video clips uploaded to teachertube, ran into troubles with audio quality, and struggled with hardware and software issues. By group concensus, we decided to revise our plan based on what we had to work with and ended up with a rough draft that focused on cheating in high school and its consequences. Feedback was collected, a new list of needs was developed, and we all worked to obtain missing video segments,research obtaining our creative commons license, and acknowledging credit for assets we used courtesy of creative commons licenses. In the end, I feel like we produced a PSA that clearly defines what cheating is, the consequences of cheating, and the importance of demonstrating character regarding academic honesty. Two things that we really wanted to incorporate into our video were the student perceptions of cheating at different ages and background music. Given a longer time limit on our product, more time to complete our PSA, and more time to search for appropriate music, I think we could have sent an even more powerful message to students and parents. In any event, I am very proud of the video we produced and really enjoyed this collaborative experience. I couldn't have asked for a better group. Click on the video below or check us out on youtube at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/SKFleischer#p/a/u/0/0Igiy20rtwo