February 2002 — Applications
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Osborne High's Mass Media Digital Transformation
Osborne High School Principal U.S. Davidson and teacher Catherine Page-Quail share Applied Magic's Screen Play Editor with mass media students Clifton Berry, left, and Brian Doyle.
Osborne High School Principal U.S. Davidson and teacher Catherine Page-Quail share Applied Magic's Screen Play Editor with mass media students Clifton Berry, left, and Brian Doyle.
If statistics were the sum total of measure, then many stories would never progress beyond an uncomfortable first glance. Take Osborne High School for example. Located just eight miles from downtown Atlanta, Osborne High School is governed by Georgia's Cobb County Board of Education. According to an article published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2000, more than one-third of Osborne's student body turned over in a single year, one-third of the students live in poverty, one-third of the students do not speak fluent English, absenteeism rates are high, and SAT scores are low.
This however, is a story driven by people, not statistics. One such person is Catherine Page-Quail, a 15-year veteran of the broadcast television industry, who signed on in August 2000 to be Osborne High School's mass media technologies teacher. "I was immediately impressed by the layout of facilities in the mass media suite," says Page-Quail. "I felt that this area had enormous unrealized potential."
Today, Osborne's mass media facility consists of nine working rooms, including a full studio, a well-equipped master control room, five edit bays and a classroom area. By the time Page-Quail arrived, however, the program was already more than 5 years old, and the equipment obsolete. The 60 to 80 students enrolled in mass media each semester were sharing four VHS cameras in various states of disrepair, one cuts-only VHS editing setup, and one Video Toaster editing system. "When I arrived, the situation was strained and volatile," says Page-Quail. "There wasn't enough editing equipment to accommodate all of the students, much less handle the workload, which led to infighting over the edit rooms." It was apparent to her that expansion and upgrades were essential to the success of the curriculum and to the school's production schedule.
Choosing the Right Resources
Fortunately, Osborne High School Principal U.S. Davidson, Ph.D., was behind the program 100 percent, and recognized the value-added opportunity of using an improved video operation as an in-house image builder and morale booster for the school. With this realization, Davidson gave the green light to research and recommend new equipment. The next step was finding and choosing the right resources to fit the program and the school's budget. "Cameras weren't the issue," says Page-Quail. "It was the big-ticket items, the editing systems that needed careful consideration. This decision had to be dead-on since I knew we would have to live with it for a long time to come."
Then a trusted source suggested she look at a company called Applied Magic, which had a new system called ScreenPlay.
