Avon Lake High School teachers try out new technology at open house

AVON LAKE — The Shoremen are looking to the future with new technology options being made available to students at Avon Lake High School. Teachers got firsthand experience with the school's new innovation space and podcast studio as well as equipment from the television production studio at a technology open house Thursday. Students had the day off while teachers held conferences and checked out the new equipment in the school's LAKE Center. In the school's new innovation space, Dave Miller of the Educational Service Center of Lorain County showed teachers a number of both high-tech and low-tech devices to which students have access. In addition to sewing machines and button makers are a 3D printer and a robot that can be programmed to draw on dry erase boards with a marker. Miller showed off a 3D printing technique known as lithophane, in which a textured imprint of a photograph is printed in a thin sheet of plastic. When the sheet is held up to a light, it reveals a clearer image of the original photo. "That's my dad's 1958 Corvette, and you can see the photo was in 1961," he said, holding up a lithophane, revealing an image of a man leaning onto a car. "Any photo that we have, we can use a free website to convert it into a lithophane." Television production teacher Scott Herrick said the district is trying to bring more attention to its TV production operation, and he said many students currently involved are so invested that they have taken home production equipment to develop their skills. Much of the equipment is the professional standard across the media production industry, he added. "The idea is to get these guys to have some form of income when they get out of here, and to have some form of excitement about it, too," Herrick said. When he first came into the school's TV studio three years ago, Herrick said it was "destroyed," but he used his knowledge from years in the broadcasting business to fix it up over a period of time. This year, he has turned some of his attention to a new project, a fully-loaded podcast studio, with the help of students who have dedicated themselves to developing the space. "We can stream out, we can take phone calls, Skype calls," sophomore Andrew Brown said. "We have a software that will record it and be able to stream it out wherever we want." Curriculum director Jack Dibee said the podcast studio, while it is certainly fun, also offers plenty of educational capabilities. "Students will be able to use (this) for projects, teachers will be able to put out podcasts, our superintendent is planning on doing a regular podcast," he said. Two students in the advanced television production and broadcasting class already have plans for a politics podcast, in which they constructively discuss political issues, said teacher Drew Gardner. Another student is planning a sports podcast. Some students came into school on their day off for the technology open house. Sophomores Syd Ryan and Sydney Affolter operated the teleprompter in front of a television camera that is often used to record interviews with candidates for class officers. "(Ryan) actually brought this up to me last year and asked if I wanted to get into it, and I was like, 'sure.' I had no idea what I was getting into but I love it," Affolter said. "It's just a really good opportunity that I'm not sure a lot of people understand that we have here." Contact Dylan Reynolds at (440) 329-7123 or dreynolds@chroniclet.com. Follow him on Twitter @drey1357.