What I'm working on: Visualizing California's overcrowded classrooms
Thursday, November 19, 2009
As a champion of innovation in journalism, I am thrilled when I can incorporate some of the technologies I blog about it into my professional work.
As a recent addition to the staff of California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, I was tasked with visualizing California's high student-to-teacher ratio and the multi-billion dollar class-size reduction program that aims to reduce it. The result is three multimedia pieces that visualize different aspects of the story and use three different technologies to bring them to life.
California is ranked as one of the very worst states in terms of the ratio of students to teachers in the classroom. I constructed a Flash graphic that enables the viewer to compare this ratio to other states and the District of Columbia. The list in the left sidebar can be sorted alphabetically or by the rank provided by the National Education Association.
California Watch Director Louis Freedberg traveled to Plummer Elementary in Los Angeles and shot video interviews with teachers at the school with a Flip video camera. I was tasked with taking the hours of footage and condensing it into a few minutes of video. Anyone who has used the Flip knows it's prone to shakiness and low audio quality, problems that had to be worked around. Using Final Cut Pro, I edited the video into three parts to make it more palatable for the web. One of the videos is embedded below, click here to view the other two.
California as a whole has a larger than average number of students in its classrooms, but we also wanted to show how 30 of the top school districts in the state compared to each other. I constructed an interactive map using Map Builder that showed stats and anecdotal information for each district and also included a map of the district inside the marker itself. Click here to view the interactive map.
This story is my first with California Watch and with many more California-focused stories coming down the pipeline, there should be many more multimedia packages for me to share here. Let me know what you think and be sure to read the print story by Louis Freedberg and Hugo Cabrera that anchors the aforementioned multimedia features.
Also on 10,000 Words:
• Why being an unemployed journalist is the best thing to ever happen to me
• My favorite multimedia: What I've been working on this year
• 25 Things I've Learned About Journalism
• How Twitter saved my career... and my life
As a recent addition to the staff of California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, I was tasked with visualizing California's high student-to-teacher ratio and the multi-billion dollar class-size reduction program that aims to reduce it. The result is three multimedia pieces that visualize different aspects of the story and use three different technologies to bring them to life.
1. Interactive Graphic: How do California classrooms compare?
California is ranked as one of the very worst states in terms of the ratio of students to teachers in the classroom. I constructed a Flash graphic that enables the viewer to compare this ratio to other states and the District of Columbia. The list in the left sidebar can be sorted alphabetically or by the rank provided by the National Education Association.
2. Video: How are larger class sizes affecting California teachers?
California Watch Director Louis Freedberg traveled to Plummer Elementary in Los Angeles and shot video interviews with teachers at the school with a Flip video camera. I was tasked with taking the hours of footage and condensing it into a few minutes of video. Anyone who has used the Flip knows it's prone to shakiness and low audio quality, problems that had to be worked around. Using Final Cut Pro, I edited the video into three parts to make it more palatable for the web. One of the videos is embedded below, click here to view the other two.
3. Interactive Map: Are California class sizes increasing?
California as a whole has a larger than average number of students in its classrooms, but we also wanted to show how 30 of the top school districts in the state compared to each other. I constructed an interactive map using Map Builder that showed stats and anecdotal information for each district and also included a map of the district inside the marker itself. Click here to view the interactive map.
This story is my first with California Watch and with many more California-focused stories coming down the pipeline, there should be many more multimedia packages for me to share here. Let me know what you think and be sure to read the print story by Louis Freedberg and Hugo Cabrera that anchors the aforementioned multimedia features.
Also on 10,000 Words:
• Why being an unemployed journalist is the best thing to ever happen to me
• My favorite multimedia: What I've been working on this year
• 25 Things I've Learned About Journalism
• How Twitter saved my career... and my life
1 Comments
November 23, 2009 2:37 PM