Our BBC School Report Team must have impressed the BBC with their appearances on the news and radio this year, as we were recently invited to Broadcasting House, to take part in a BBC Academy pop-up event in Cardiff.
Maesteg School’s top reporters took part in numerous workshops at BBC Cymru Wales, which included sessions led by journalists who work for the BBC. Running alongside our recent Careers Week, the first workshop gave our pupils an insight to life working in the world of media. We caught up with Lola Videan, Evie Fear and Letia John to see what they thought of the day.
“The first workshop was really interesting because we were told about the careers we could pursue within the BBC and the world of multimedia,” said Lola. “We also had a glimpse of the future, when we were shown a video of how holograms will be used within our homes in the next 10 years. It was cool to get a sneak preview of this technology. I can’t believe that a regular TV set could be replaced by hologram within the next few years!”
“We were really amazed by the work that goes on in the background of our favourite shows and about how set design and special effects are so important to the finished product.”
“Later in the workshop, we were asked to decipher whether a story that was presented to us by a BBC journalist was, in fact, Fake News?” added Evie. “Despite the story sounding far-fetched, it was actually true and none of us could believe it. It was a reminder to us all, to always double check the facts when we read a story in the news.”
The next workshop was run by videographer, producer and journalist Mark Robertson, who is a multimedia trainer for the BBC. Mark’s mission was simple, telling us; “I want to spread the message that filming content can be accessible to anyone and if you own a phone or tablet, you can have your own channel and publish stuff!”
Enthused by Mark’s presentation, our reporters set out writing, recording and playing back their own pieces of journalism to everyone present at the workshop, which you can view for yourself at the bottom of this page.
“I really enjoyed this workshop,” said Letia. “We only had 20 minutes to write, film and edit our content before showing it on the big screen to all the schools. We were given the theme of The disadvantages of being a teenager today. We were nervous to put our film up on the big screen, although Mr Shaw said we had done really well in such a short space of time. We were given a round of applause from the other groups for our efforts and we did enjoy watching our final videos.”
Letia was also impressed with the seminar in the afternoon: “we had a Q & A session with a journalism student who is working at the BBC. The student found that studying whilst working on the job was the best approach for her and encouraged us to make films ourselves on any media we could get our hands on, whether it is vlogging or recording a podcast.”
The Q & A session led nicely into the third and final workshop of the day, where our pupils got to tap into their ‘inner journalist.’ “We had to talk about our favourite shows and imagine ‘what if…’ for the different scenario’s that we see on screen,” said Evie. “We then wrote down our own stories and ideas to read out to the group.”
“We learnt that nearly every story has a hero character,” added Lola. “After being told this, I wrote a short story about the sun disappearing and an astronaut who went to see if he could find it and save planet earth?! The workshop leader liked my idea a lot!”
“The day at the BBC was really inspiring, everybody there was enthusiastic and very encouraging. We are very glad that we could go and hope to get an invite to the new BBC building in the centre of Cardiff when it opens next year!”
Enjoy the video’s below made by our pupils in just 20 minutes on iPads…