Anglia Ruskin University are committed to encouraging participation to University and have a dedicated ‘Widening Participation’ team who work across the East Anglia region with schools and colleges to show students first hand what university life is like by engaging prospective students in real University situations.
Hal MacLean and myself have worked with the widening participation department for many years, and continue our work under the Cleveratom flag. Read about some of the past projects we’ve done together click here, here, here, here and here.
This year the two Summer School projects we worked together on took place over weeks and was titled ‘Broadcast Journalism’. The students were to be introduced to how media for journalism is created for broadcast.
Each week students (24 in week one and 21 in week two) were introduced to University life by Ian, his team, and current University students.Hal and myself also recalled our own studies at the University, before introducing them to what we had done around the world in this field, before inducting the students in film, animation, sound creation and broadcasting skills.
Once we had inducted the students to the technology we then mixed up the students into cross-school groups and challenged each group with a different activity:
- Group 1 - Make a 1 minute issue related story, for a news programme
- Group 2 - Interview the general public about Group 1’s news item piece (vox pops!) and make a 1 minute fair reflection of opinion
- Group 3 - Make a 30 second advert for a product
- Group 4 - Make a 30 second advert for a service
- Group 5 - Make the idents for the news programme, present live links between content, interview someone live on air about the issue created by groups 1 and 2, broadcast the show live on the internet
The students were then told that on day two of the programme all content would be broadcasted live as a news programme on the internet, by them, at 3pm and all studio based recordings had to be live (not pre-recorded!).
Using Live Channel running on the Apple platform for the broadcast, and iMovie, GarageBand, iStopMotion, iTunes and iPhoto to put together the material, the teams had to talk to each other. The students had little or no experience in the software used for the project.
It was great to see students from an unrelated previous Summer School Project we were involved in back in 2005 (at our previous employer) taking part in the event.
Week 1: Issue (created by groups) - Are we really British?
With a big challenge, and a strict deadline for broadcast students had to work together to form a broadcast production crew, delegate jobs and ensure the broadcast was no longer than five minutes. Students found natural roles, realised the urgency of deadlines and production needs and produced an excellent product.
Matthew Eaves, Malcolm Burnett, Nick Platts and Hal MacLean from Cleveratom Ltd were on hand as experts for the event. This is the final product.Here is the final completed piece of work for week 1, uploaded to Youtube:
Week 2: Issue (created by groups) - Super Skinny
Like with week 1, the new students had a tough challenge, formed into groups, shared information, and worked together to hit the deadline.This weeks group decided to call the programme ‘Live at Three’. Yet again, another excellent piece of work.
Matthew Eaves and Hal MacLean were on site from Cleveratom for the duration of the project.
Here is the final completed piece of work for week 2, uploaded to Youtube:
Collage Norwich staff in a Clay Animation and Music workshop for 20 of the team. Rugroom staff work with young people on the AS at the college.
Blue Balls: 
Catterpillar: 
Every year our team work with Saffron Walden County High School to undertake a creative challenge which encourages students at the school and its partner primary schools to work together and engage with creative technologies. This year the challenge was as big as ever and involved all ‘groups’ taking part having to work together with each other to make ‘one big story’.