Elizabeth (Lizzy) Berryman, Director of the PBS Teacher Center in Virginia and Chris Sloan, a high school teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah joined us to talk about a collaborative project between YouTube and the PBS News Hour called “Video Your Vote." The purpose of this project is to look at the actual voting process. The project involves Flip Cams for high school teachers (especially ones in battle ground states) that want to have interview the voting age kids in the school or have students interviewing adults about the voting process. Lizzy joined us on the first half of this podcast to and answer some questions about the project.
In the second half of the show we help a teacher new to http://youthvoices.net set up a group and register her 7th graders on Youth Voices.
Do you have students in your classes who are voting for the first time?
The NewsHour and PBS are partnering with YouTube on an exciting new project called “Video Your Vote,” which will look at the health of democracy in America by focusing on issues surrounding voting and attitudes towards voting. Each class will record and upload 10 short videos about the voting experience, contributing to a special YouTube pool of clips on the topic.
There are a variety of ways the videos can be shot. They could be perspectives from students who will be voting in the election for the first time, interviews with parents, teachers and school staff about their past voting experiences, or interviews with election officials about how they are preparing for the election and what they are expecting. Students could visit a retirement community to speak with elderly voters, or if the school will be a voting station they can talk to whoever is in charge. This
project is a work in progress so we are certainly open to your ideas.
There is also a voting day component to the project. The good folks who are soponsoring this project would like students to take the cameras to the polls on Nov. 4 if possible. This can happen in a variety of ways, but a few possibilities are sending the cameras with students voting for the first time, or accompanying a few students to a polling place to interview people after they vote. There will be a special “How To” video from YouTube that will give guidelines for video taping at the polls.
Please email Lizzy if you are interested in getting involved in this program at [email protected].
Click Read more, below, to see the chat transcript.