ITVS Joins Leading Bay Area Media Groups to Celebrate Teachers

This past month, over 100 media-savy educators attended the first Bay Area Media Innovators in  Education event in San Francisco. The event was co-hosted by ITVS, KQED, BAVC, and the San Francisco Film Society.

At a time when school budgets are tight, it is rare for teachers to get treated to wine, gourmet treats, and free media content. But ITVS and four other leading Bay Area media organizations decided they deserved some pampering and inspiration.

This past month, over 100 media savvy educators attended the first Bay Area Media Innovators in Education event at the Lab art space, co-hosted by ITVS, KQED, BAVC and the San Francisco Film Society. The event was a showcase for educational resources from each organization, and featured a panel discussion with four teachers who are using media creatively to engage their students.
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Tags: BAVC, community classroom, education, KQED, resources, san francisco film society, teachers

And the Best. Teacher. Ever! is … drumroll, please…

ITVS Community Classroom announces the Audience Winner for our educator contest

Well, it was not easy. We received moving stories from around the country about teachers who go the extra mile to illuminate young minds.

Teachers like Beatrice Pfaff, an American Sign Language Instructor in Indianapolis who inspires her students to overcome the isolation they can feel from being deaf, or P. Curry Leslie, Jr., a much-loved television production instructor in Raleigh, NC who has mentored hundreds of young people who have gone on to successful careers in journalism. Or elementary school teachers like Virginia E. Mahaney and Mary Causey Hamilton, from Wilbraham and Cambridge, Mass., who both reached out to a student in need of validation and helped her find her own strength.
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Tags: best teacher ever, community classroom, education, teachers

A Deadline and an Honorary Entry for the Best. Teacher. EVER. Contest.

As a reminder to submit your nominations for our Best. Teacher. EVER! contest, we thought we’d share a nomination from ITVS Managing Editor Brooke Shelby Biggs. As a staff member, Brooke can’t compete for the Kindle or other cool prizes, but we thought her description of her kindergarten teacher, Ms. Sharon Janulaw, was worth sharing. Don’t forget to send us YOUR nominations – last day to submit is tomorrow, Friday May 26!

The teacher I would nominate is Sharon Janulaw, who was my kindergarten teacher at Santa Margarita Elementary School in Marin County, California in 1975. Not only was Mrs. Janulaw innovative, but she treated us like actual people with the ability to think for ourselves and discover worthy things under our own power.

Ms. Sharon Janulaw

Science lessons were conducted under the quaking aspens in the playground behind the classroom, where silkworms bred. We were in the midst of demographic change in the area post-Vietnam and an influx of immigrants from Korea, among them some of our classmates who spoke little to no English. In response, Mrs. Janulaw taught us the Korean alphabet and numbers as a special lesson every week, which also infused us with a sense of openness to other cultures.
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Tags: Awards, best teacher ever, education, ITVS, schools, teachers

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

Live Chat with Me Facing Life Filmmaker Dan Birman

Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story aired last night on Independent Lens and today, the filmmaker participates in a live chat with high-school students starting at 1PM PT.

This week, nearly 100 seniors at Impact Academy High School in Hayward, California screened the documentary Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story, which follows the case of Cyntoia Brown, who is serving a life sentence for a murder she committed at age of 16. The documentary, directed by Dan Birman, aired nationwide last night on Independent Lens.

At 1PM today, Dan Birman will field questions from the students in a live chat right here on Beyond the Box. Feel free to join the conversation today and discuss the film Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story.

Tags: high school, jail, justice system, juvenile, teachers

Free Lesson Plans Bring Context to Protests in Egypt

For educators and community organizers: check out our FREE lesson plans and video modules for the film Shayfeen.com: We’re Watching You about three women in Egypt who form an online watchdog group to monitor the elections in 2005.

This is a great way to teach about democracy, corruption, and the power of citizen journalism to effect social change. The lesson plans are part of our Women’s Empowerment collection of educator resources.

Watch a trailer of Shayfeen.com after the jump.

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Tags: Cairo, classroom guide, democracy, discussion guide, Egypt, elections, lesson plan, middle east, politics, student resources, 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

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