Nominate the Teacher Who Influenced You Most

Teacher Appreciation Week may be over, but there is still time to nominate your favorite educator to win a chance at a Kindle, a DVD copy of the widely acclaimed film Pushing the Elephant, and other cool prizes. Send us your nomination no later than next Monday, May 23rd for consideration. We’ll announce the top five later that week, and let the world decide the top winner.

As we all know, teachers are often overworked, under-appreciated, and meagerly compensated. But all of us have had teachers who helped us grow up, make sense of the world, and to find our footing.

At ITVS, we want educators to get the props (and resources) they deserve. Community Classroom does that by giving teachers free stuff: standards-aligned lesson plans, fabulous independent film content (often using Independent Lens films), innovative games, discussion guides, and more.
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Tags: best teacher ever, classroom, contest, education, ITVS, school, teachers

New Lesson Plans Arrive for Pushing the Elephant

ITVS Community Classroom announces the launch of an exciting new resource for teachers, NGOs and youth serving organizations, based on Pushing the Elephant, which aired last week on Independent Lens.

This powerful family portrait is set against the wider drama of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When civil war came to Rose Mapendo’s Congolese village, she was separated from her five-year-old daughter, Nangabire. Rose managed to escape with nine of her 10 children and was eventually resettled in Phoenix, AZ.

More than a decade later, mother and daughter are reunited in the U.S. where they must come to terms with the past and build a new future.

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Tags: classroom, college, congo, education, high school, lesson plans, teachers

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

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