Long day….

Crazy crazy day!!! As many of you know today is Wednesday. 🙂 Which means we had a news broadcast today. The students I work with haven’t seemed to have caught on to the fact that if they put off doing their stories, It makes more work for us to do in a short amount of time. This week was especially frustrating for me because the kids didn’t have a broadcast last week, giving them extra time to work on their stories, and they still didn’t get anything done. Well, I take that back, I had about three of them get their stories done on time. So that left Monday for writing stories, and a late night last night for writing the script, getting images for the background of the live show, and doing a practice run.
That brings us to this morning. I had to get up early to go finish getting things ready for the broadcast, but I was really really tired, and had to drag myself out of bed at 7:00. I was hoping to be up earlier than that, but no such luck. I went over and picked up Kevin (one of GCI’s School Access employee’s who is here to help with VTC issues) and Leonard (a PolyCom employee here for the same thing) from Browns lodge where they were staying. Its a bit of a walk down to the district office, and it is a little chilly out, especially for Leonard who is visiting Alaska for the first time from California. I got into the office and made sure the computers were set up the correct way, and all the other little things you need to worry about before a live show. The kids started showing up around ten to eight in the morning all excited for the production. We scrabled with getting computers set up with the correct video clips, and got the script put onto the telprompting computer. By then it was getting close to time, and I got a tape put into the camera, and got the lights set up. Austen was getting the anchors placed in the virtual set, and making sure the chroma keying was working correctly. Hunter was double checking the video coming into the mixer, Cassandra and Nilson were queing up the video clips, Mia, Chara, and Kimberly were rehearsing the script, and Ben was getting ready to produce the show. At 8:30 A.M. Ben told everyone to be quiet, and gave the countdown 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and gave the signal for the show to begin. After a few minor audio issues, the show went off a success.
The rest of the day was crazy. Kevin, Leonard, and I did some VTC testing in the AM. We had some serious issues with Shishmaref, which took until 2:15 to fix. I then taught the Journalism Class to a couple students in Shish and a class full in Elim. That went alright. Its kind of difficult to teach over VTC. I guess its just different. Basically the rest of the day was filled with getting things ready for the broadcasting of wrestling and volleyball this weekend, and had one more meeting with the SBT kids. After everything was said and done, I got home around 7:00. Kind of a long day. Well, I had better get some sleep.