Lights, Cameras, Dragons: Inside One Teacher’s Student-Run Broadcasting Program

Blair Cartwright

Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of the Mascot Media Talking Preps podcast. We’re with Jerry Bell, who was our Broadcast Teacher of the Year last year and won the award again this year. Jerry, thank you for joining us. Congratulations again.

Jerry Bell

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Blair Cartwright

Were you surprised? I mean, what’s it mean to be honored as our National Broadcast Teacher of the Year—not only once, but twice, two years in a row?

Jerry Bell

It’s amazing. I give full credit to these students. They sit there and really take ownership of this program and do everything from the start to the finish.

A lot of kids, we learn at the very beginning, and by the end, they’re running it by themselves. I’m just kind of a bystander at the end making sure everything runs smoothly, but I really appreciate every single thing that they do, and what they do to learn and build this up.

Our administration has been fantastic and behind me 100%, helping us push this program and support the students. So between the students, the community, and our administration—it’s a great honor, and I appreciate getting it.

Blair Cartwright

And we see the studio behind you—incredible. I do want to mention Fairland High School, Proctorville, OH. Should give them a shout-out and a credit.

What’s the most rewarding part of it for you? What do you get out of it? Because the stuff your students are doing is incredible. But how—what is your reward in this?

 

 

Jerry Bell

For me, it’s always going to be the lightbulb moments. It’s when that student finally understands the process of what we’re trying to do and how.

We’re learning from the basics. Last year, I had a pretty seasoned group. We had students that had been in the program for at least two years. Most of those students graduated, so this year it was a lot of new students.

We had a football game—basically, the way our schedule works is, in years prior we had a couple of weeks before our first home game, and we don’t do a lot of away games. So we did our home game. It was kind of “jump right in, feet to the fire” since we started.

They learned the basics, but then when they got to full operation—just like I said before—they’re running it themselves. They’re asking me questions before I have to ask them.

Watching the smiles on their faces when we get that really good shot, or that good replay, or just an overall great livestream

Blair Cartwright

Now this is your fourth year to teach this. How did you get involved in teaching broadcasting? What fueled you?

Jerry Bell

This is a little crazy. I’m actually the art teacher here at the school. I teach art and ceramics. I also teach graphic design and basically some CAD programs here.

But whenever they hired me, one of the things that the previous art teacher had taught was a morning news broadcast—which is where I’m at now. So with the morning broadcast, it was a live production that the students put on every single morning for about five minutes. But it had been losing some steam. The equipment was getting a little aged, and they just needed something changed. So when they hired me, I came in and said, “Well, let’s change a few things.” First, let’s go ahead and start streaming this to YouTube so the kids can have a chance to watch it all day long—not just that first initial morning. That way, if there’s important news, we can get it out to the students.

It started small. The first year, we only had a couple of students coming back for the program. But we fostered that by taking them to see real-world applications at a local TV station so they could see how we run things here and how it could work there.

Then it just built. I think the program has built so much. We went from a single camera when we first started, with just two microphones and a commentator, to our news program every single morning where we have six anchors. We do weather, news, sports—we try to get the whole broadcast.

Kids are writing scripts. They’re behind the cameras. They’re adjusting the lighting. Someone’s running audio mixers. We have television studio overlays going. It’s the whole process, and it just keeps building.

That’s kind of the process for me—from before to getting here—and we just build it every year.

Blair Cartwright

Wow, it’s incredible. And yeah, there’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes. What was the biggest challenge in getting it from when you took over to where it is now?

Jerry Bell

The initial challenge was the student buy-in and the fact that we were doing stuff that was changing.

The first question I asked the students when I came in—because before, it ran through an RF system and kind of just went live on the TVs in the classrooms—was, “How do you want to consume this?” The students were saying they really wanted a chance to get it on demand, which is the most current platform.

A lot of them said, “Well, we watch YouTube, and we watch Twitch, and we watch other forms—Facebook. Is there a way we can get this to that platform?” So YouTube seemed to be the best platform we could use.

So we developed the FHS News channel. And with that channel, kids started watching the news. Then the next year, the class grew. The year after that, it grew again. And now we’re on an application basis for the class.

We go through and see which kids are going to be great for the class, and it just keeps growing. So that’s fantastic. I’m hoping we have another big group next year.

Blair Cartwright

Awesome. Like, for instance, how many applications approximately would you get, and how many positions are available?

Jerry Bell

We don’t like to have more in the class than, say, about 25. I like to run a five-person team in here where each team rotates. So one week, they might be on cameras and lighting. The next week, they’re on production. The next week, they’re anchors.

We also have one that does B-roll footage, and they go out and film throughout the class period, throughout the day, and then they combine that material for us. We do what we call the alma mater on Fridays. We partnered with our choir director, and they’ve sung the alma mater for us.

So we play a video montage throughout the week of what’s happened, with the alma mater playing. We show that to the students every Friday.

They don’t understand how great this will be when they get older—like me—when they’ll have a video yearbook of what’s going on. They’ll be able to go back and look at that. And then they also get us B-roll footage that we can use throughout our broadcasts.

Blair Cartwright

Awesome. What is one of the surprising things that you’ve learned that you didn’t have any idea about when you started this? Are there a couple of things?

Jerry Bell

I didn’t expect the buy-in from our community to be as strong as it has been. The administration was behind us, and the kids were building up, but once we started putting this out, the buy-in from the community was just fantastic.

We switched our channel—originally it started off as what was called MIT Fairland. They tried during COVID to put out some videos and maybe a sporting event where people couldn’t attend. But I talked to them and asked if we could transition that, and got with our athletic director and our vice principal, who is one of our lead play-by-play announcers, and we decided to change it to the FDN channel—for Fairland Dragon Network.

We said, “Let’s just add everything. Let’s go all in. Let’s put everything Fairland on it. Let’s do our sports. Let’s do debate. If Beta Club’s doing something, let’s just make this a channel about everything Fairland.” And the community bought in fantastically.

What’s happened is our viewership has grown. Our watches are drastically higher. We had one game—for us, we’re a small community—that had 11,000 views. For us, that’s huge. And we don’t charge for the channel, so it’s just a great way to get the content out.

The biggest thank-you is we get alumni and past administrators or community members who send us notes or letters that they’re watching us in Florida. They do tailgates on Friday nights in Florida and put up our broadcast on the screen. I make sure we relay all that information to the students because that’s what helps drive them to get better every single day, every single week.

Blair Cartwright

That’s awesome. That is—I mean, things like that, it’s just—you’ve created something, and I’m sure you had no idea it would become massive like this, but it almost fuels itself, doesn’t it? I mean, when you get to this point, what’s the challenge now? Because it becomes expected.

It almost fuels itself, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s and when you get to this point, what’s the challenge now? Because it becomes expected so.

Jerry Bell

Yes.

Blair Cartwright

Yeah. How do you manage that?

Jerry Bell

Well, what we’re doing now is—I’ve always told my students to think of this as the end user. What would make this broadcast better for them? So, if it’s lower thirds, then let’s add lower thirds. If it’s instant replay, let’s put in instant replay. If it’s better overlay graphics, let’s get those in there. Let’s think about what the end user is going to have.

Coming up, we’re going to add in some new things. We tried out a telestrator this year for football, so that’s going to work out. We’ll probably be doing telestrating during the game live, which will be good.

We’re also going to be adding in commercials and some other things this year that we haven’t had in the past, which will be added to our broadcast. Once again, it’s just new technology—trying to add to it and make that experience better.

I want to showcase our student-athletes. I want them to feel comfortable in front of the cameras. That’s one thing we do really well here—we get our students in front of the cameras all the time for interviews after the ballgame, pre-games, because we want them to feel comfortable when a camera gets put on them from the national spotlight or national news.

That’s one of the key things. But I also want to showcase our students in the video department here. I want to showcase their skill sets. I think we’re rolling out helmet cam again this year—we put a camera inside a helmet and have students just run out on the field so that the average person can get a sense of what the experience is like for a football player on Friday night—running through our dragon, out to the field, and seeing everybody.

So it’s important to us. I just want to showcase that and keep building on that and just keep adding new stuff. I don’t plan on slowing down. We’re just going to see where this takes us.

Blair Cartwright

That is awesome, and that’s the cool thing too. The technology is constantly evolving, and you guys are on the cutting edge of it. That’s incredible. Is there something from this past school year that in particular stands out that the team accomplished?

Jerry Bell

That is awesome, and that’s the cool thing too. The technology is constantly evolving, and you guys are on the cutting edge of it. That’s incredible. Is there something from this past school year that in particular stands out that the team accomplished?

Jerry Bell
Yeah. For me, I had two of them.

The first was our 500th episode of the school news channel. For that 500th episode, the kids wrote their own scripts completely. I didn’t have to help with anything besides proofreading. They decided on camera angles. They decided on every single graphic change. For us to reach 500 episodes in our morning news within the last four years—I thought that was a huge accomplishment for us.

We entered a local contest from Ohio University called Mpix, and our news broadcast team won first place this year. I was really proud of them.

And then the other one for me was a basketball game between our rival school, Chesapeake—where I went to school—and it was Fairland vs. Chesapeake. It was one of our biggest games. The gym was packed. We had overflow in the cafeterias. We had televisions showing the broadcast down in the hallways. We were just trying to get as many people watching as we could.

And at one point, about a quarter of the way through, I realized—I wasn’t running it, managing it, handling it. I was just watching all my students handle the whole broadcast. They had headset comms on. They were talking to the cameramen. They were on the floor. They had wireless cameras on baselines. They were directing each other about where to get the best angle or shot.

It was just great to see the unit run as a whole and everybody doing what they needed to do. And I didn’t have to worry about a thing—besides getting to watch everything.

Getting to watch them do it was probably the biggest accomplishment I think I can have as a teacher—getting to see them do this broadcast by themselves.

Blair Cartwright

That is awesome. That truly is awesome. So how many hours would you say that they’ve put in this year? And how many events? I mean, you do the news, you’re streaming this, that—how much content did they create over the past year?

Jerry Bell

I’d have to look. We had, I think, 200 total watch hours this year—total. We do a lot of broadcasts. I think we did five or six football games, eight or nine basketball games.

We got to go do a playoff game at Ohio University in Athens at the Convo Center, which was a different setup. We had to set that stuff up and do that. We did a pregame and an audio podcast for the entire event.

It’s hard to say exactly how many—we’ve done so many different ones. For how many days we have here—170-some—we had 170-some broadcasts this year just with our news broadcasts. And then all the game footage and the hours we have to spend getting that stuff ready—it’s a lot.

I’m really proud of how hard they worked this year.

Blair Cartwright

That’s incredible. So if someone’s watching this and thinking, “You know, I’d like to start something like this at my school,” or if a student’s watching and thinking, “Man, this sounds cool. I’d like to get involved”—what advice would you have for somebody just thinking of getting started and doing something similar?

Jerry Bell

First, talk with your administration. Talk with your principals. Find out what kind of buy-in they’re going to have with you on this, and see if they’re going to be backing you to get this started.

Second, I would probably—like I did—start a video and news club. With the video and news club, it gives students a chance to come in and see the process, see what they want to do, try to get them excited. See what their motivations are going to be—whether it’s to get the news out to their students, or if it’s strictly for sports and trying to produce a quality livestream broadcast.

Once you have the students and you get the administration behind you, then it’s just a matter of picking the right software, picking the right equipment to make it easy to use, easy to manipulate, easy to change—and a product that’s going to be reliable. You don’t want to have a livestream that cuts out or has issues.

So I think going that route would be the way I would go again.

Blair Cartwright

As far as equipment and stuff starting out, is it good to kind of start small and work up big, or try to bite it all off in one chunk, do you think?

Jerry Bell

I think starting small is the best way to go. With the technology changing the way it is and the price of equipment, you can get a video encoder that uses Wi-Fi or Ethernet and can accept multiple inputs for audio or video. A small audio mixer, a decent, really good camera that you can record with—and you can start doing your livestreams from there.

Then it’s just a matter of every single week: do you want to add something new? If you need to add more cameras, you can add more cameras. If you need better audio, you get better audio.

We add new equipment every year to make this broadcast better, but every time we add equipment, it’s always need-based. If we’re going to start doing after-game interviews and we only have two microphones—so two headsets—you can’t do that. So adding two more headsets would be the next step.

It’s a process. But I would start small and then add as you need. That way, you can get the products that you need, the products that you want.

Keep in mind, this is an ever-changing field. Equipment gets better, it gets cheaper, it gets more advanced. So you don’t want to buy really big up front and then be stuck with equipment while technology zooms past you.

Blair Cartwright

That makes sense. That totally makes sense. So you do this all year—what do you do to get away? Because I’m sure you need a break. Do you have downtime? And what do you do to just kind of unwind?

Jerry Bell

Well, for me, like I said, I’m the art teacher here, so I teach art and ceramics also. I start my day with news here, and then I get to go into graphic design and ease my way into my art and ceramics classes, which are great. That’s the end of my day—to balance out the technology with what we’re doing.

But when school’s out, I just love spending time with my family. Me, my wife, my daughter, and her fiancé—we try to do fun trips and go to dinners and just relax. Really, my home life is my balance. I really love and appreciate my family. I can’t even tell you what that means to me—when I get to come home after a long day, they’re super excited and super supportive of everything that I do.

Blair Cartwright
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. And I know you’re teaching today, so I need to wrap it up. Just—man, congratulations. Y’all are killing it. Give us the YouTube channel again for folks who want to check it out, because it’s worth watching, folks.

Jerry Bell
Thank you. If you go to YouTube, type in “FDN–Ohio,” I think we pop up as the first “FDN” now, which is great. But FDN–Ohio—you’ll see our logo. It’s got the green shield on it and the FDN with a little dragon tail that comes down off the swoosh.

We actually have some older footage in there. One of the things we were adding this year was footage from, like, 1993, which was the year our head coach in football had his senior year. So we put his stuff up there. We’re adding retro videos and other content too—just to build that library.

Blair Cartwright
OK. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, continued success and congratulations again. And thank you for taking time to visit. Jerry Bell, our National Broadcast Teacher of the Year—our guest today on Talking Preps. We’ll talk to you next time.

Jerry Bell
Thank you.