Teachers Equipped With Script Writing Skills to Enhance Digital Learning Experiences

The Distance Education Unit of Education culminated its accelerated workshop for script writing for teachers on Friday, June 17, at the Kingston Office.

Script Writing for Teachers is intended to continue producing curriculum-based scripts that foster passion for the content while enhancing the student learning experience, as stipulated by the Ministry of Education.
The workshop, facilitated by Veteran Educator, Dr. Seeta Shah Roath, lasted a week. During the course of the week, teachers were exposed to writing and other production skill sets that will advance their pedagogy. Dr. Roath stated, “⁠The recent workshop focused on harnessing the teachers’ knowledge and experience of the learners that they interact with daily and combine that with the tools and methodologies of the scriptwriting frameworks of pre-production television and radio elements to produce viable curriculum-based learning scripts that could be used to produce actual relevant broadcast content.”

Workshops on Educational Television Scriptwriting for teachers started in 2012. It engenders curriculum knowledge, classroom experience, and passion for teaching and learning that teachers have to create scripts for broadcast content. These workshops were not necessarily conducted annually but continued over the last 14 years, with scriptwriting for radio being added in the last few years.

While writing was the key focus of the workshop, other key areas that were focused on included: drafting of a production outline, name of production, idea of the production, logline, age range (grade level), duration, synopsis, dramatic question, line-by-line development, audio/video script, storyboard, questionnaire, and feedback.​

Marvin Cornelius, a teacher from Ketley Primary School, lauded the exercise, noting that it put together the relevance of technology and applied learning while advancing learning for his pupils. Another teacher, Ms. Smith, from St. Margaret’s Primary School, also praised the week’s activities, noting that they were well planned out. She added that her July- August vacation will be spent producing lessons for her pupils.