There comes a time with every team when you have to stop coaching, teaching or drilling and kick them out of the safety of the nest and see if they can fly. As I write this, that is where we are with the Wheaton Innovates (WiN) Team.

I’m sitting outside of the Innovation and Design Building in Boston waiting for them to arrive. To see how well they planned out their morning commute. I’ll always believe that “early is on time and on time is late” so we will see if they took that to heart when I taught it to them.

The month of instructional time on campus has come to an end and the final week was a fun one.

We started it off with my friend Sarah Francomano coming in and teaching them a crash course in media training.

Her years of experience was shared in an open conversation with the students and several of them were excited to connect with her afterward for possible future work and guidance.

Having only taught at Wheaton College for a single semester, there is still a number of faculty and staff I have yet to meet.

Patrick Johnson is an Assistant Professor of FIlmmaking and offered to give us access to the school’s filmmaking gear and to specifically walk us through using the Orah 4i camera and how we might use it to shoot 360-degree videos.

It was fun to watch the students who had not ever used this sort of gear before getting full of excitement and wanting to learn more. My mind was a bit shook when I had to show one how to use a zoom on a standard DSLR camera as they had only taken photos on their phone before.

We decided that the next lesson to learn was the art of shooting interviews. A student member of the team took the lead and walked us through setting up lights, how to focus properly and the basics of shooting these kinds of videos.

To put into practice what they learned, we went out on campus and filmed a few interviews with members of the team. They quickly learned the “fun” of trying to film videos on a busy campus with landscapers, campers and other distractions causing the starting and stopping of videos.

The team was eager to do a proof of concept video for Wheaton’s marketing team for a virtual tour of the campus. They decided that the library lobby would be the optimal place to see what could be done and we quickly learned that this new media format comes with a set of challenges all it’s own.

We were all excited by the possibilities that this sort of medium opens and had a good conversation about where and when we might be able to use it for our MassChallenge clients.

The team has arrived, so I should wrap up this post.

Today, I get to see how they perform as a team and selling our services. I believe I’ve taught them well, but now the work begins and I’ll find out for sure.