Shawnee Mission South Students Record Podcast with PBS

Shawnee Mission South Students Record Podcast with PBS
Shawnee Mission School District

Through a partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Shawnee Mission South Video Production Program KSMS, had the opportunity to participate in the making of a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) podcast. 

The podcast, “On Our Minds" is an Edward R. Murrow award-winning, student-led and student-produced podcast about the biggest mental health challenges young people face. The Season Four debut is all about capturing student successes in specialty school programs. It was made with the help of high schoolers from all around the Kansas City area. During the day-long workshop, students learned tricks and tips to create richer and deeper sounds, a skill they were able to bring back to their classroom productions. They also had the opportunity to be involved with the physical recording process in front of the camera. 

“When our real-world learning counselor emailed me and asked if any of my students would be interested in going to a podcasting workshop, I wasn’t sure how interested students are in podcasting,” Carolyn Ewing, advanced video productions teacher, recounted. “I just threw it out there to see. Then I had a large amount of kids interested in going. I think that they were curious to just kind of get out of school and see what that was all about.”

But for the South students, the experience extended beyond the single workshop when the PBS team selected Shawnee Mission South to shoot video B-roll (supplemental footage) and record ambient background noise. Students helped to record the natural sounds of classrooms, hallways, and teachers. 

“My favorite thing about the PBS Podcasting was going around the school and recording the sounds,” said Noah Xiong, a junior at Shawnee Mission South.

“We talked about sound design, and how everything is very visual these days, but you don't realize how much effort goes into making the sound design of podcasts and even just visual stories. It's a very important skill that often gets put on the back burner because you're so worried about what people see,” Ewing said.

South senior, Ian Wilkinson, was one of the students who worked on making the sounds into a story.

“I edited together clips of different recordings that we got from students and I put together a compilation of them to tell as good of a story as I could,” Wilkinson said.

Senior Josie Finlason had the opportunity to play with sound by selecting background music for the podcast.

“It was really fun because I got to help set the tone of the podcast. I thought that was really cool,” Finlason said. 

As a thank you for helping with the podcast, PBS brought in one of their drones, a Mavic 3, to show the KSMS students. The drone pilots taught them how to fly the Mavic 3 and let the students get some video of the outside of the school building. KSMS students may use these videos to enhance their future projects.  

Listen to “On Our Minds” here.