Every year the National Civic League holds an All-America City Award Video Contest.  This year, because of  its partnership with the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, the group is communities participating in the network to submit a short video on their groundbreaking efforts to get more students reading proficiently by the end of third grade.

The video contest is strictly voluntary and will have no influence on the outcome of the 2012 All-America City/Grade -Level Reading Awards. Consider it an opportunity to be creative and have some fun, while letting others know of the innovative work you are doing in your community.  We are hoping to get as many entries as possible and to show the best of the videos during the conference and awards presentation June 30-July 2 in Denver, Colorado.

Specs

Videos should be no more than three minutes in length. The focus should be on how your community is responding to one or all of the challenges identified by the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading:   school readiness, school attendance, and summer learning loss. The video could be about:

• Something the community has already accomplished (success stories)
• How the community is going about engaging the public in a plan for the future.
• The particular challenges and opportunities the community faces as it prepares to address these issues.

We encourage creativity, good story-telling, and effective use of the medium, recognizing that most of you are not professional videographers and may be using basic equipment or even smart phones or iPads. We want you to have fun!   Use whatever software you have at your disposal to make the videos—Windows Moviemaker, iMovie, Final Cut or any video-making software you prefer.

For those who are interested in improving their video production savvy, we have produced this useful The GLR Technical Assistance Guide for Video! You can access it by linking here.

Delivering the video

Videos should be completed and sent to the National Civic League no later than  June 21.  We will post them as soon as we receive them and viewers can begin voting for them.   You can deliver the edited video to us in the following ways:

• Send us a file (preferably a Quicktime or WMV file) on a jump drive or DVD.  It can be sent to the attention of: Mike McGrath, National Civic League, 1889 York St., Denver, CO, 80206.
• Use a third party “large file sharing provider” such as YouSendit to e-mail the file or upload it to a server and send a link to mikem@ncl.org.
• Upload your video on You Tube or Vimeo and e-mail us a link to the video.*

Even if you choose to send your video electronically, please make sure and supply a copy of the video on a DVD or jump dive to NCL by the time of the event in Denver (June 30-July 2) so we can play it if your community wins.

The videos will be posted on the All-America City Facebook video page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/All-America-City-Awards/277887828621?sk=videos

Please do not use copyrighted music on your videos. Facebook will not allow us to post videos with copyrighted media on it. If you want to use music, there are websites you can visit to obtain royalty free music for a minimal fee.

Voting Instructions

Encourage everyone you know to “vote “for their favorite (hint, hint, your community’s) video by visiting the All-America City Award Facebook page. Use social media to spread the word. You can even use regular media (newspapers, TV news, etc) if they are willing and able.

Step 1: Voters should visit the All-America City Facebook page and click on “like” if they haven’t already done so.

Step 2: Click on the word “videos” on the upper, right side of the screen and go to our Facebook Video page.

Step 3: Click on the video to watch it.

Step 4: Click on the word “like” that will be displayed to the right of the video once it begins to play.

The video with the most “likes” will be declared the winner.

Note: when the video is first posted, it will appear in the Facebook newsfeed. People can “like” it in the newsfeed and that will be tallied also.  Videos will be posted as soon as we receive it so the sooner you send your entry, the more time it has to get “votes” by the public.

For updates on the All-America City Award Video Contest, visit www.allamericacityaward.com

We’re looking forward to seeing all the great grade-level reading work in your communities and sharing it with the world!

*Do not post the link directly on the AAC Facebook page newsfeed yourself. NCL has to put it on our video page for the “likes” to count.