Driving Question:
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How do we as an advertising agency satisfy the needs of a client?
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Project Description:
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Students in this project work together as an advertising agency to promote a clients mission and vision for supporting senior adults (age 50+). Each student will create a video for the client based off the script that the client provides. Students make all choices regarding the imagery chosen for the script and the editing. In addition to editing individual videos, students work in teams to investigate needs of senior adults and how ALOA works to meet those needs. Finally, they create a presentation and give it to a group of senior adults at a local church, nursing home, or retirement home. While this project is tailored to a specific client that we've worked with for a couple years, it could be revamped to work for a different client.
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Individual Product: Videos for Client
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Group Product: Presentation to a group of senior adults: Coming 2017
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Public Audience: Individual videos made public on client's website. Presentations are given to a group of local senior adults (chosen by student).
Teacher Reflections:
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Pros:
This project design is heavy on soft skills, namely communication. Students have to find footage of senior adults off campus and ask them to fill out a photo release form. This can be awkward, but there are great activities built into the project that prepare students for these conversations. Additionally, students have to locate a group of local senior adults. Setting this up requires that they prepare for a phone call/conversation and have that conversation to set up a meeting. On top of that, they have to create a presentation that promotes the clients mission. It's incredibly real-world. This project changes student perspectives on senior adults, and it builds a sense of empathy for older generations. Students in my class have said that they've started speaking to their grandparents more and that that they've shared some of the resources from ALOA. By the end of this project, students learned a lot of digital citizenship skills. They weren't allowed to video people w/o asking them; they needed to have people fill out a photo release form. Additionally, all the imagery they used had to be from a paid site like istockphoto or from a library of Creative Commons licensed imagery using the search.creativecommons.org website. Cons: I asked the students to include three main points in their presentations to senior adults: the purpose of their visit, a brief history of ALOA, and their top three resources recommendations from ALOA. Additionally, I encouraged them to show a video from the ALOA website as part of their presentation. All in all, this was too boxed. There needs to be more voice and choice. The "box" limited the potential and made it sound too scripted. The best parts of this year's presentations were the sharing of the actual resources, the personal stories that students shared about making the videos, and the stories they shared about how their perceptions of senior adults had changed. I think that more critique and revision could be built into the presentation portion of the project. Currently, I had one activity called no-stress speeches, one practice presentation with an outside expert followed by the live presentation to a group of senior adults off campus. Despite these three opportunities for critique and revision, I saw the potential for so much more. It might be different for you depending on how often your students speak in front of outside audiences, but for our students, we needed lot more practice to bring the presentations to a highly professional level. Maybe I'm expecting too much, but that's how I felt after the presentation. Other tips: We found that relationship matters a great deal when speaking with senior adults. As the saying goes "people don't care what you know until they know that you care." This was true with our presentations. This year, every group started by giving their presentation; then they did something with the senior adults like playing skip-bo or bingo. Next year, students should plan a social activity before the presentations. This will not only help the message be received better, but it will also put the students at ease before presenting. They won't be presenting to complete strangers; they'll be presenting to people they've gotten to know a little beforehand. |