free teaching materials

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

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 Community Classroom, Independent Lens 2 Comments

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.