CPE’s Exhibition Night has become a big deal both at CPE and around the school district. Students spend a big chunk of their school year collaboratively developing a challenging, class-wide project that emphasizes “real-world” skills.

This year the focus in my class is on video production, which requires from the students extensive planning, script-writing, communication, cooperation, and the use of technology to film, edit, and produce a final product.

For many years now my students have created episodes of CPETV, which highlight “what life is like inside and outside an American public school.” If you haven’t seen an episode, click here. Some of these episodes have actually been picked up by Southern Oregon Public TV.

For Exhibition, I’ve asked each small group of students to independently produce an episode of their own. These shows take hours and hours to create. In the past, though students did a lot of the filming, I took on the bulk of the work planning, directing, and editing. This year, however, the students will handle every aspect on their own. In fact, students have already begun working with video editing software, and my first groups started filming segments of their episode this week. Others are busy writing scripts and getting logistics ironed out. With any luck, they’ll all be able to premier their episode at Exhibition Night on April 27th.

Let’s address your safety concerns. These episodes will appear on the internet. We do a couple things to protect students. Whenever possible, we post final products in an Mp4 format directly on the school webpage only. That way only people with a connection to CPE are likely to see them. When videos are too large to do that, we use a private Youtube channel. That way the shows will not turn up on a Youtube search. Viewers can only get to the video through the CPE webpage. Finally, we do not use last names of students nor the school’s address in any of the videos. If you have any concerns about this, please contact me.

The classroom is buzzing with excitement over our project. I’ll check in with you frequently with more details. In the meantime, thanks for your support!