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Middletown High gets kids on the air

In many ways, schooling has to prepare you for many things – from kindergarten, teachers are ushering you to become a full-fledged participant in society, able to read and write and do enough math to figure out tips at a restaurant. But also, it should prepare you for the job market, giving you skills to adapt to new technologies, new industries, and new ideas. Middletown High School was recently the feature of NBC Connecticut’s daily newscast for news of their own.

Thanks to a leading-edge program, students at the school run a daily news program called Blue-Tube that leans more on the professional side of broadcasts than your typical monotone intercom announcements. Students here learn how to use cameras, build graphics, and work with audio interfaces just like they would at any professional studio – perhaps just on a smaller scale.

While the phrase “pivot-to-video” doesn’t hold the same water as it did when major media companies were touting the phrase as a way to show the increasing amount of people consuming video, the trend is clearly here to say. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram are full fledged outlets that compare to or even outrank traditional media outlets.

Of course, legacy outlets still exist, and are unlikely to go away any time soon, but the world is expanding.

Even outlets like the New York Times, which still issues an ink and paper product, has branched out to fully immersive video and podcast platforms.

Lorensbergs, which offers universities software services says that student video production can offer students a multitude of transferable skills, that is skills that allow a student to succeed in any situation. They cite communication, presentation, digital literacy, organization, and teamwork as key areas students learn when they take part in video production.

And that is clear in the many stages it takes to put on even a single broadcast, let alone run one five days a week. From scripting to lighting, audio to visual, there’s no step that can be missed when getting a video out to an audience, making that video live only adds another level of complexity to the production.

While Middletown offers many cutting-edge classes – NBC also covered a robotics class held at the high school – the Blue Tube is indicative of the kinds of education kids need in 2023. Video is all around them, every where they look, and finding a passion for it in high school could mean finding a job in it after college or professional level training. With the report citing students going on to award-winning work, this isn’t the boob tube of the past.