Teen Driving : Distractions, Part 3

Posted by Lauren Thomas in English 1 - Dunn on Sunday, May 12, 2013 at 7:11 pm

Hello again! My name is Lauren Thomas. I am a freshman from Science Leadership Academy. I am writing a series of blogs called You and the World. For more information, I urge you to read my first blog post for an introduction and my second blog post that leads up to final installation, this post.

For our last third of this project, everyone in the class had to become an “Agent of Change”. The mission for us as Agents of Change was to make a difference in the community. Your change would depend on your issue (for example, if you did blog post on animal cruelty, your Agent of Change would be to volunteer at an animal shelter). Because my topic is Teen Driving, there isn’t much you can do except raise awareness. I decided to create a Public Service Announcement (PSA) using iMovie.

My first idea was to record a video of what a teen driver should and shouldn’t do behind the wheel. I had big plans for this so I asked my friend Maddison to help me film. When I watched the footage back I got really upset because it didn’t turn out like I planned.

I went back to the drawing board and came up with a new idea. I decided to make a PSA of teens who were affected by teen drivers. Of course, I didn’t use real teen drivers, I had friends volunteer to help me out. Over Spring Break I posted many statuses on Facebook to get as many people as possible to help me out. On Friday, April 5, 2013, I gathered all 13 volunteers to help me film my video at lunch. I gave each volunteer a piece of paper with their person’s story on it. The stories I used were either real or based on real stories. I was really happy when the PSA turned out perfectly, I couldn’t have done it without the people who volunteered to help.

To actually make the difference, I had to present my video to people. I presented my PSA to the Bey/Martin (and a small number of VK’s) advisory of freshmen on Monday, April 15, 2013. On April 22, 2013, I presented to Mrs. Dunn’s senior advisory. Click here to see the video me presenting to her advisory. (Thank you to Morgan Caswell-Warnick who recorded me and took pictures.) I also had some of the seniors play the Toyota Teen Driving game from blog two. Vinny Russell tried the first first level of the game.

Here was his scoring (Vinny was better in some parts of the game than Dillon who took it in my second blog).

I feel that this was a really big project for me. It was something very different from what I was used to doing when I was in middle school. I had fun with this project and I learned a lot about myself while doing so. This project had me open up my eyes to see that there are many teens, more than what is shown on the news, who have driving accidents. I feel like my PSA could really make a big impact on people who watch it because it’s all true.

I’m not the only person who has a You and the World project, all of my volunteers do too. Please visit all my volunteer’s blogs, I couldn’t have done my project without them: Michelle Friedman’s Immigration Reform, Morgan Caswell-Warnick’s LGBT Rights, Angel Owens’ Self-Harm, Jiwon Choi’s Domestic Animal Abuse, Dillon Hershey’s Pet Euthanasia, Trinity Middlebrooks’ Child Adoption, Lauren Hummel’s Animal Abuse, Zack Hersh’s Litter Problems, Des O’Donnovan’s Animal/Vehicle Collisions, Andrew Roberts’ Abortion Issues, Miles Cruice-Barnett’s Litter Issues, Rosalie Swana’s Gay Marriage, and Anna Sugrue’s Gay Rights.

And the best part of this project: my final PSA! Here is the video! Please enjoy it.