A Covington Electric Bright Ideas Grant put technology in the hands of Red Level High School students that will help them broaden their broadcast journalism skills.

Multimedia teacher Keron Kyzar said has been teaching the class since the fall, but got the equipment after taking her students to J-Day at Troy University.

“I decided to apply for this grant as an individual teacher,” Kyzar said. “So I asked for $675 and got the full amount of $750. We decided to do this after the J-Day at Troy and Robbyn Taylor recommended that we do this for the students.”

Kyzar said that one of the main reasons for developing this class was to provide students with another extracurricular activity.

“For students that don’t play sports or sing and dance, this is a way for them to get involved,” Kyzar said. “But it is actually a class. The multimedia enrichment class, which was announced during orientation this year.”

Several students from both the junior high and the high school are involved in the class.

“We started out with 24 overall,” Kyzar said. “But some decided it wasn’t for them and got out of it. We still have a very solid group of both junior high and high school students.”

For the junior high students, Kyzar hopes that they will stick with it until high school.

“My goal for some of the junior high students is for them to stay with it all the way until high school,” Kyzar said. “That way they can develop their skills and expand on what they are doing.”

Kyzar said that she purchased all of the necessary equipment to make a broadcast news video.

“I was able to get an iPad and basically anything that would be necessary to go out and video a story that you would see on the news,” Kyzar said. “We got an iPad, a microphone and the software on the iPad that they will need to video, record and edit.”

Though the multimedia class is still in the infant stages, Kyzar has high expectations of her students.

“Down the road, the hope is that we could go film and cover a ball game,” Kyzar said. “Or interview a coach, but we are in the infant stages right now.”

Troy University journalism instructor Robbyn Taylor, who is also a Pleasant Home alum, walked students through making a video, editing and working the new gadgets.

“I was able to meet with the students during J-Day at Troy where they were able to tour Troy and see what the journalism program is all about and do little mini workshops,” Taylor said. “So, Mrs. Kyzar and I started talking about mobile journalism and that being one of the things that might be a niche for Red Level that nobody else was doing. She then decided to go out for a Bright Ideas Grant and they were very receptive to the idea of bringing this technology into the classroom and teaching students in Covington County in new and exciting ways.”

Taylor said that mobile journalism is the way of the future and it is important to teach high school students at a young age.

“This is the future of journalism,” Taylor said. “Even for broadcast reporters and general print reporters they are having to use Facebook live from events and having to use their cell phones to tweet when cameras can’t be present. This is really how things are shifting, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to stick with traditional ways of doing things, but people live in a 24-hour news cycle now. They want things first and fast and the reality of it is that anyone can put anything on the Internet now and so we want to make sure that journalists are actually doing that too.”