Despite having the audacious goal to broadcast all of the great things that happen at The Overseas School of Colombo, Gecko Network has completely ignored a last demographic of the OSC community: The Primary School. Seeing this gap in the Gecko Network portfolio, when I became the leader of the group, I decided to setup an after school activity in the Primary School for Primary GeckoNet. Early on in the year, because I was quite busy adjusting to the DP and being the leader of GeckoNet itself, I didn’t do much to further this goal other than making a presentation along with Aidan about GeckoNet to the 5th graders. It was during the second semester that Primary GeckoNet really began to take off.

I consulted with Ms. MJ Mora, the GeckoNet supervisor, about setting up a primary GeckoNet and she directed me to the Head of Primary ASAs, Ms. Sue Turner. After a short conversation, Primary GeckoNet was added as a new after school activity for 5th graders for the 3rd Quarter of the academic year. After a few weeks, we found out that 4 boys had signed up and were coming to the activity on the following Monday. It was a new challenge for me, leading some younger kids and simultaneously training them in the art that is videography. I began by showing them the last episode of Gecko News, we had produced and asking them what they noticed and how we could do something similar for Primary. By the end of the session we made a decision to produce a monthly Primary GeckoNews as we only met once and we couldn’t really expect any work from home because the participants had very bad computers and were doing most of the work using GeckoNet’s machines. Looking back now, I think this plan went pretty well because we ended up covering 4 months of Primary GeckoNews and also made a special edition segment for the PYP exhibition.

Because we were producing monthly content, the first two weeks were completely devoted to gathering content, which includes interviews and other footage, and producing a script. Usually a majority of the content gathering and script gathering was done by half of the group, whilst the other half would be the anchors. Speaking of anchors, after the script was completed, the next session was devoted to recording the A-roll, the footage of the script being read by the anchors. Thereafter, the next session was used for editing the video together and then sharing with the school. On every occasion, we couldn’t get the editing done during the one session we had, which meant that I had to come in during the free time I had at school to finish it off and send it out for presentation. Nevertheless, all of the Primary GeckoNet participants had a chance to edit on Adobe Premiere and learn some of the basic skills like starting a new project, importing files and splicing footage together. We kept to this schedule for both the February and March editions of Primary GeckoNet, but due to school closure during April and May, we couldn’t do the same for the next two videos. More on that later, but the February and March editions came out great and got a lot of great feedback; you can check them out below.

 

Because school closed due to unforeseen circumstances in late April and May, we were left with just two more sessions in order to complete both the next editions of Primary Gecko News and the segment about the PYP exhibition. As a result, we decided to condense the April and May months into one segment and get the script writers to work from home for just this one time. The first few editions of Primary GeckoNews was so impressive that the number of participants for the last quarter of the year had tripled to 12. This increase in human capital allowed us to get the scripts done very fast, but then we realized that we wouldn’t be able to conduct the next session because both Ms. Mora and I would be travelling to Australia because we’d won a video competition. As a result, we had to come in after school for the second time that week in order to shoot the A-roll, and the editing would have to be done on our trip. I’m in Australia as I write this, so the editing part is still an ongoing process.

Nevertheless, Primary GeckoNet has been a great success and I have no doubt that it will continue well into the future. It was a great experience for me because I had to play a major leadership role, when managing primary students, teaching them the skills we used in GeckoNet and producing compliment-worthy content. Let’s hope we manage to pull the PYP exhibition and April/May Gecko News segments together in time and have some great content to share when we get back.