As we prepare to make our Public Service Announcements, our students are in the process of organizing their thoughts and creating Hurricane Preparedness brochures. Last week, I shared some interesting hurricane tracking sites with them and one of them has since become my latest favorite. The day I shared it with my class was also the day we taped our first show of the season for PalmBreezeCAFE (our web and tech local cable TV show). I decided to ditch what I had previously planned and show this site instead. Here I am with co-host, Lee Keller, showing the site from National Geographic.

In addition to the National Geographic site, some other useful sites are:

• Ready Classroom from Discovery Education
• Hurricane Maker (Sun Sentinel)
• FEMA for Kids

In class we are studying hurricanes and my students will begin to create preparedness brochures and Public Service Announcements. I think it will be a great learning opportunity for them to condense all they’ve learned and prepare a few points to share and help others. I’m not sure how familiar they are with PSAs but they most likely will have seen a Safety on the Internet PSA while watching TV. When I was really young, I can remember watching Smokey The Bear tell me that –only “I” could prevent forest fires.– That PSA actually had the unintended consequences of making me feel guilty because I wasn’t in the forest and I wondered who would prevent them if I wasn’t there.

After we spend a few minutes discussing what a PSA is, the students will be divided into small groups, storyboard their ideas, write a brief script and shoot their videos. I own two Flipcams and have asked my students’ parents if they have any they’d be willing to loan us for the project. At some point, I hope to raise some money to buy 5 or 6 for the classroom to do projects such as this.

Below is a PSA some of us might remember. Do you know of any PSAs and if so, what did you learn from them?