One of the biggest changes for NDA in the 2021-22 school year has been the development of the NDA Triton News daily morning announcements show. 

It started out as a way for the school to give students at home virtual learning access to the daily announcements. 

Then it was a small production with just Frau Laaksonen and Mr. Masarik as the cast and limited technical equipment for a quality show.

 Although the show started out small, it was a success, and the idea was up for expansion. 

At the end of the 2020-2021 school year, Laaksonen reached out to get students involved in the morning show for the next year. 

For the first few weeks of the current school year, Frau and Masarik handled the announcements while students were training behind the scenes. 

Since then, the show has been run mainly by students and has made bringing news to high schoolers more fun.

While all students know what the show is, not many are aware of what needs to be done for a single episode of the show to air.

 There are two major groups of students who contribute daily to the morning show.

First are the students who serve as both the on-air talents and writers for each episode. 

These students have numerous responsibilities including compiling all of the news regarding the school, turning that information into a script, going on-air to deliver the script, and finally attending meetings twice a week during advisory. 

These meetings serve to make sure that all of the personalities are on the same page about what will be occurring in the week ahead. 

In these meetings, students organize who would go on air each day, brainstorm ideas and contests for the show, and discuss possible new segments, and anything else related to the show. 

The second group that helps with the show is the student tech team. 

While much less involved with the content of the show, these students help to make sure that the show runs smoothly each day. 

Each morning, two students from the team are selected to head up to the newsroom.

Once there, they are responsible for turning on all of the equipment in the newsroom.

After this is done, one of the two techs starts the live stream and controls the transitions between scenes

At the same time, the other makes sure the show is running smoothly while additionally controlling the slide presentation played on the tv between the two talents.

With the success of the Morning Show over the past two years, the school has decided to offer a class focused on teaching students how to produce the show. 

Two teachers will be teaching the class: Laaksonen handling the management and talent part of the show, and Jake Gerlikovski, the school’s current technical director, handling the technical aspects. 

The new class will be during the first period, and the classroom will likely be the same room that will be used to shoot the show. 

There will be new tech equipment used to offer an even higher quality show.

Despite the Morning Show growing to be a great success, it’s safe to say that the Morning Show will be stepping up its game even more next year.