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Site lets community keep up with high school

MILTON — Did you miss the Milton Show Choir Invitational this year?

Looking for video from the 1998 Milton High School homecoming?

Or maybe you just want to catch up on the morning announcements.

You can find all that and more on Milton High School’s multimedia Web site, Red Hawk Media.

Multimedia teacher Dale Kittleson, with the help of his students and network administrator John Holt, set up the site in December.

Kittleson and the multimedia students already run the Milton cable access channel, but some district families don’t have cable. Others get the Janesville access channel, Kittleson said.

The new site allows anyone with an Internet connection see events, student-produced shows and even city meetings on demand.

The Web site broadcast basketball games and wrestling matches live over the winter. Its first test was a live broadcast of the show choir invitational in January, Kittleson said.

“Any given time there were 100 people watching,” he said. “It stressed the system.”

The site includes a video-on-demand page with past homecomings, graduations and concerts.

Kittleson recently added video of past Milton City Council meetings. The city provides the video and Kittleson uploads it, he said.

The city hopes to eventually broadcast meetings live, possibly before the end of the year, Administrator Todd Schmidt said.

“This is an exciting change because it adds another option for exposing citizens to the operations of our local government,” Schmidt wrote in an e-mail to The Janesville Gazette.

Student volunteers produce the broadcasts for school games and events. They film the events, add graphics and sometimes offer play-by-play commentary.

Seniors Claire Cottam and Hailey Foss said they enjoyed broadcasting the show choir tournament.

“We got to talk on these headset things, and we were in charge of it all,” Cottam said.

The site archives the school’s morning show and the weekly “Red Hawk Talk.” Both are produced by the multimedia classes.

Parents and alumni enjoy the site, Kittleson said. For example, one of his students moved to Wisconsin from Georgia, and his relatives watch him on the morning show.

“That’s kind of cool to hear,” Kittleson said.

The site hasn’t gained much attention yet because the school hasn’t advertised it, Kittleson said. It attracts about 30 visitors a day, though it had almost 2,000 visitors in January, the month of the show choir invitational.

Kittleson hopes to broadcast football games next year and continually add new video, he said.

“We just want to be able to keep expanding,” he said.