Los Angeles Unified School District: Education Through Creation

Lights, Classroom, Action!

Roderick Leverett is the kind of educator whose impact will be felt by his students and his community for generations. As the Career Technical Education Teacher at Gardena High School, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Roderick is charged with getting his students ready for life after graduation with transferable skills they can take with them to college or their first employer. The transferable skill he’s most passionate about: video.

Determined to educate his students with the tools they’ll find in the real world, Roderick applied for several grants that allowed him to purchase the types of professional video equipment we’re all familiar with, but aren’t often found in a high school classroom. While his kids proved to be quick learners with their new gear, Roderick discovered a whole new set of challenges that come with high-end equipment… high-end post-production. As he watched his student’s limited time get eaten up with file copies, transcoding, re-linking, and convoluted media management, he quickly had to start cutting back on the number of shoots and the scope of the projects he could do each semester. Everything kept getting stuck in post. Ironically this sort of thing is exactly what his students might expect to find at their first job, but Roderick wasn’t going to watch his new gear collect dust and his students disengage from the creative process.

By chance, Roderick heard about a short film project that Apple and LumaForge put on with a team of students from Hollywood High. The students were shooting with RED cameras, and editing their projects together from something called a OWC Jellyfish server. Roderick wondered if the OWC Jellyfish might just be the tool that completes his video lab and gets his students creating again. This is the story of how Gardena High School became Powered by OWC Jellyfish.