BY KATE PASTOR

When fifth-grader Jared Morales showed up at the Bronx New School, PS 51, bragging about how he and his cousins got 20,000 hits on YouTube in a single night just for being silly on camera, his technology teacher Christy Crawford was immediately inspired.

She said she’d been thinking about trying to harness the powers of online video sharing, and Jared’s story was impetus she needed to get started.

On Feb. 27, her classroom was divided up into groups of fourth graders given Ivy League names — Columbia, Harvard Yale, U. Penn and Princeton — each representing its own newsroom.

Students held yellow index cards with their pitches for stories written upon them. They evaluated their own ideas and those of their peers, deciding how well developed each was, as well as their importance. Then, they fastened the story pitch index cards onto cardboard squares in the proper order.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Crawford worked at Dateline NBC in a story unit where she pitched ideas. So in these convergent times, her newsroom know-how and her job teaching technology to kids has helped her put together the perfect “now” project.

With low-cost Flip video cameras sitting in boxes on a high shelf near the entrance of the classroom, she said she was making sure kids learned typing and computer skills before she even let them touch the recording equipment.

However, once they have refined their pitches and practiced their keystrokes, students will get the chance to conduct on-camera interviews. The project will culminate with each group producing newsworthy videos that they will then upload to YouTube, by the end of the school year.

Ideas have came easily for Ms. Crawford’s students, ranging from international problems they learned about on television to hyper-local school issues they grapple with everyday.

“What I’m thinking about, how the people in Manhattan look skinnier and much healthier because they have gyms,” said Kya Lewis.