To view pictures of the 'newsroom' set to music, click here 

It’s early on a Wednesday morning and Abbey Park High School’s broadcast studio is a beehive of activity.

A broadcast studio isn't something you'd expect to see in a high school but much like professional journalists, these Grade 11 media students – some cast in front of a Hollywood-style green screen – are busy prepping scripts, checking cameras, testing microphones and ensuring the right camera angles are lined up. Engineers and producers sitting in a soundproof room tell their broadcasters they will be live on air in a few minutes.

Think of it as the Abbey Park News Channel, serving the school’s student body while promoting positive, responsible messages.

It's a relatively new semester-long media and technology course. It’s billed as a program that creates teamwork skills, fosters independent learning and develops organizational skills through a hands-on experience.


Started a year ago, the course enables students to develop media knowledge and skills while designing and producing projects in the areas of live, recorded, and graphic communications. Students may work in the areas of television, video and movie production; audio production; print and graphic communications; photography; digital imaging; broadcast journalism; and interactive new media.

Each morning, the team arrives about 45 minutes before air time to finalize the script and video for a five-minute broadcast shown to students through Abbey Park’s closed-circuit televisions and audio system.

Student Michael Cacho is one of the desk “announcers” this particular day. He took the course because he wanted to learn how media works, both in front of, and behind, the camera.

“I love the technical aspect of stuff,” Cacho said. “You learn a lot of transferable skills in this course. You learn how to manage projects. There are so many organizational skills you learn here you don’t learn in other classes; that’s really amazing.” 

The “production crew” is a vital cog to the smooth-running wheel that is the morning announcement news crew. Grade 11 student Kelsie Zielinski helps ensure the sound is sharp and the microphones are set up properly.

“Some people talk louder than others so I have to make the sure the microphones are all the same levels,” she said.

Zielinski took the course to get a sense of television to see if it is a medium she might want to pursue for a career.

“It’s been fun. This is a group thing so you learn how to work better with people.”  

The course is an intensive experience. It places a strong emphasis on broadcast and live video production, electronic news gathering, and pre-recorded, digitally-edited television and video projects.

Students also expand their awareness of environmental and societal issues related to communications technology and investigate career opportunities and challenges in a rapidly-changing technological environment. Students gain valuable time management and leadership skills while honing their creativity working on a variety of group and individual projects.

Like all courses offered at the Halton District School Board, ensuring the goals of the province’s curriculum are met is of the utmost importance. In this case, it fits the Ontario curriculum for Grade 11 communications technology, allowing for a single or double credit Grade 11 live video production course. 

The course runs as a double or single credit course first period each semester in order to produce the announcements to be looped throughout the day. The produced announcements include special ENG (electronic news gathering) segments pre-recorded from events happening within the APHS community such as sporting events, fundraisers, drama productions, concerts, culture night, shows, environmental events. On this particular day, a powerful message discouraging texting while driving was shown to students. 

Lead teachers Dan Payne and Veronica Kleinsmith wanted the course to be a fulsome media experience, and they think they’ve achieved that. They are pleased with how the program has been received by the school administration team, parents and, especially, the students.

“Students are learning about communication systems, how they work, plus the steps in bringing material to an audience through different stages of production,” says Payne. “They’re learning more life skills like organization and time management.”

Students spend the first six weeks of the course learning about theory of media including things llike interviewing sources and sourcing out stories, and how equipment works; later, they do their actual broadcast and production lessons. The physical class the students access is split into two rooms – a broadcast suite, with a couple of editing rooms and a computer lab class.  

Kleinsmith believed the course would be students “to get up out of their seats and have something different to do, something realistic.”

Count Abbey Park Principal Maria McLellan among the big-time fans of the program. She likes the public service announcements students produce because the end result involves peers talking to peers, during which time “a lot of learning takes place.

"It’s fabulous. When the announcements are on, the students stop, watch and listen," says McLellan. "And the commercials are messages, which are wonderful for us at Abbey Park,” she said.