Hey Teachers! You’ll Dig This

If you’re a teacher, we know times are tough. You are struggling to enrich your classroom, but beset on all sides by budget cuts, growing class sizes, and a dearth of basic supplies. Fear not – the new ITVS.org will help you find free (yes free) standards-based resources for your classroom that will engage and inform your students in new and innovative ways.

Our newly redesigned website is now a content destination for educators and youth-serving organizations. It now hosts our complete collections of lesson plans, activities, learning games, and film modules drawn from the Emmy Award-winning PBS series Independent Lens and ITVS’s Global Perspectives Project. You asked for it, and we listened: While we’ve been producing these resources for years now, the new ITVS.org website makes them more accessible and easier to use than ever.

The search and sort function in our section for educators will allow you to find the appropriate resources that align with the subject matter in your syllabus right from the landing page. And our crisp new online video player will allow you to stream film modules in your classroom right from our site.

Now you have even more options — our lesson plans are available on the site as HTML pages, you can still download them as PDFs, or get them on a DVD you can order online.

So what are you waiting for? Get your hands on our free resources and watch your students respond when they make connections between the facts in their textbooks and the films, games, and exercises we’re offering 24 hours a day.

Tags: classroom, education, Free, lesson plans, students, teachers

Community Classroom Offers Free Teaching Resources

This Long Island hip-hop group helped set a high bar for sampling artistry with their debut album 3 Feet High and Rising, released in 1989.

George Clinton helped invent the genre of funk with his groups Parliament and Funkadelic (collectively known as P-Funk); his music has been sampled in several important hip-hop songs.

Can you own a sound?

That is the provocative question raised in a new resource from ITVS Community Classroom: four lesson plans and film modules for Copyright Criminals, an innovative and dynamic documentary that explores the origins of sampling culture in hip-hop music, copyright, creativity, and technological change. This curriculum is an invaluable tool for teachers or media organizations seeking to promote media literacy and ethical media production practices among youth.

The film explores how hip-hop rose from the streets of New York to become a multibillion-dollar industry, and what happened when record company lawyers got involved and everything changed. Students will develop not only a deeper historical understanding of “remix” culture, but also contemplate where it is headed. Featured artists include Public Enemy, De La Soul, and George Clinton, as well as several prominent entertainment lawyers and media scholars.

These exciting resources examine copyright law in the history of “borrowing” sounds in music, and raise thought-provoking questions about what is creative and what is criminal. The lessons are directed toward grades 9 through 12, and college students for use in the following subject areas: media studies, media literacy, social studies, history, sociology, media production, music and language arts, business, and legal studies.

Best news of all, all of these resources are FREE to educators and youth-serving organizations.

Check out our FREE resources >>

Watch a video preview of the film below:

Tags: copyright, education, free teaching materials, law, PBS, public media, teachers

Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference: ITVS Community Classroom Offers Free Materials

Last week, Annelise Wunderlich, ITVS’s national community engagement and education manager, attended the Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference –– one of the biggest professional development conferences for educators in the country. Get her take on the event below.

Chi Do, ITVS’s associate director of communications, discusses ITVS Community Classroom materials -- availalbe to educators for free.

More than 8,000 attendees participated in the Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference, sponsored by WNET in New York.

Recently, my colleague Chi Do, ITVS’s associate director of communications, and I attended the Celebration of Teaching and Learning Conference, sponsored by WNET in New York. It was a huge event – drawing more than 8,000 attendees this year!

Keynote speakers included Queen Latifah, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Queen Noor. It was refreshing to see the energy and passion of so many educators gathered under one roof, especially at a time when the nation’s education system is facing a dire financial crisis.

ITVS Community Classroom shared an exhibition booth with our sister PBS series, P.O.V., and hundreds of teachers dropped by to check out the film and curriculum resources drawn from the series. Teachers were always surprised to learn that our DVD collections — which feature modules from acclaimed films from Independent Lens paired with standards based lesson plans –– are FREE to educators and youth-serving organizations. This came as welcome news at a time when cities are slashing school budgets across the country and teachers are more strapped than ever to connect their students with the tools they need to learn.

We unveiled our newest Community Classroom collection, based on the film Copyright Criminals, which explores the ethics around copyright law and sampling in hip-hop music. We also announced an exciting new interactive game to teach about recycling and globalization, based on the award-winning film Garbage Dreams, which will launch on April 20.

Check out our FREE resources >>

Watch the video below to hear from the teachers we met at the conference.

Tags: classroom, education, free teaching materials, PBS, public media, teachers

Live Webinar Tomorrow Night: Copyright and Fair Use in the Art World and Classroom

Are you looking for ways to incorporate digital media into your teaching? Don’t understand the rules of online copyright and fair use?

On Wednesday, March 10  at 8:00 PM ET, join PBS Teachers and Classroom 2.0 for a special live webinar that will explore the implications of copyright and fair use laws in the classroom. The seminar will also explore how to share best practices in student media production.

During this event, you will have the chance to hear from and interact with filmmaker Kembrew McLeod, whose film Copyright Criminals recently aired on PBS’s Independent Lens, renowned law professor Peter Jaszi, and media producers and educators Chris Runde and Joe Fatheree.

Also, Annelise Wunderlich, national community engagement and education manager for ITVS, will present film modules and lesson plans based on the film and developed by ITVS Community Classroom.

At the close of the live webinar, you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions and have a better understanding of what kind of tools and resources are available for your classroom or organization.

Bookmark this site and join the live discussion tomorrow at 8:00 PM >>

Tags: educators, hip hop, music, PBS, sampling, teachers

Community Classroom Offers Free Resources to Educators

ITVS’s Community Engagement and Education team recently attended conferences hosted by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), which draw thousands of educators from around the country. Learn more about ITVS’s involvement from Chi Do, associate director of communications, and Annelise Wunderlich, national community engagement and education manager.

A large crowd gathers at the National Association of Women’s Studies conference to hear speaker Angela Davis.

Angela Davis was the keynote speaker at the NWSA conference and spoke before a packed house about the need for women’s studies programs to embrace new voices and to stand up to the challenges facing women and girls today with renewed strength. Our Women’s Empowerment collection does just that. This free resource provides film content excerpted from ITVS’s award-winning documentaries exploring stories of women’s leadership and empowerment in Bolivia, Egypt, Israel and Kenya. Film clips are accompanied by standards-based lesson plans, discussion guides and action guides for use by educators as well as non-profit, international and community-based organizations. Women’s and gender studies professors we spoke to were enthusiastic about using these films in their curricula.

Across town at the NCSS, we gave out hundreds of free DVDs to social studies teachers hungry for high quality film content in their classrooms. Lesson plans and clips from HIP HOP: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, SENTENCED HOME, KNOCKING and our VOTE DEMOCRACY! collections were especially popular at the exhibit booth.

We also screened the film TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai with filmmaker Lisa Merton appearing for the Q&A via online video chat. The next day we held a workshop about how to use this inspiring story of environmental activism in Kenya to connect students to local organizations focused on green issues.

Watch the video below to hear from a high school teacher who attended the screening:

Educators and staff for NGOs or community organizations can order FREE DVDs, or stream the film clips and download the lesson plans on our website. Learn more >>

We also launched our new social media sites for those interested in learning more about using film to further their work.

Join the Facebook Fan page >>

Follow Community Classroom on Twitter >>

Tags: education, environmental, social studies, teachers

COMMUNITY CLASSROOM: Women’s Empowerment

Despite the spread of globalization, democracy and digital communication, many women and girls are left out of important advancements that have deep implications on their quality of life. Furthermore, women represent only 16 percent of world parliamentarians but 60-70 percent of the world’s uneducated and poor. With a unique strategy to help educate, inspire and change, COMMUNITY CLASSROOM’s International Edition: Women’s Empowerment combines award-winning documentaries and innovative partnerships with dozens of impact-oriented NGOs and hundreds of educators.

COMMUNITY CLASSROOM’s International Edition: Women’s Empowerment highlights stories of women’s leadership around the world and engages young people in exploring their potential to become leaders, global citizens and active participants in the global movement for women’s rights. The four documentaries featured will introduce students to: an indigenous Bolivian leader fighting for labor rights; a young Israeli-Arab karate champion with feminist ideas; three Egyptian women working for fair elections and a Kenyan leader sparking a nationwide environmental movement.

› Continue reading

Tags: democracy, educators, globalization, women

TAKING ROOT Video Modules Available

ITVS is proud to present COMMUNITY CLASSROOM lesson plans and video modules for TAKING ROOT: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, which tells the story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai whose simple act of planting trees grew into a global movement.

Classroom activities and homework assignments examine how environmental issues such as deforestation are intricately linked to many other social issues, and how organizations such as the Green Belt Movement mobilize citizens to take action.

Standards aligned lesson plans are directed toward grades 9 through 12, and college students for use in the following subject areas: social studies, environmental studies, political science, women’s studies, international studies, world history, government and civics.

Watch video modules and download lesson plans >>

Tags: Africa, environmental, Wangari Maathai, women

Resources from Community Classroom

CHICAGO 10 video modules available on the PBS Web site.

Lesson plans and video modules for CHICAGO 10 will be available October 20 on the Independent Lens Web site on PBS.org. These free resources, designed using national standards, round out the election edition of Community Classroom, which includes video modules for IRON LADIES OF LIBERIA and PLEASE VOTE FOR ME and additional curricula on elections, women in political leadership and democracy around the world.

This edition of Community Classroom supports ITVS’s national community engagement campaign, VOTE DEMOCRACY!, and will feature Community Cinema screenings of CHICAGO 10, voter registration activities and video talkback from citizens across the nation.

Get the video modules >>

Tags: education, PBS, voting