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.

Joanne Parsont, Director of Education at SFFS, moderated a panel featuring kindergarten teacher Liza Mathews who won the PBS Teachers Innovation award; Elizabeth Jackson, a 4th grade teacher at Bacich Elementary School; David Maduli, a 9th grade English teacher at Oakland Charter School; and Toby Rugger, a teacher at Oakland International High School.

The panelists discussed how they overcame technical and administrative hurdles at their schools to integrate media and media literacy into their curriculum. They talked about harnessing the omnipresent technology in students’ lives to create meaning within a cluttered media landscape, and to provoke dialogue in new and interesting ways. As one audience member put it, teachers must stay current with new media tools or run the risk of losing relevance.

David Maduli, who uses ITVS Community Classroom film modules and lesson plans with his students, says he feels an obligation as a teacher interested in promoting social justice to also promote media literacy — both in terms of fostering critical thinking skills and thoughtful media making.

Teachers listened in rapt attention and circulated gathering resources, and also networked with one another. The consensus in the room was that the conversations were inspiring, and that this group should stay connected and plan similar events in the future.

The next day, Jessica Hadid from Oakland wrote: “I just want to let you know how inspired and invigorated I felt having attended your mixer in the Mission last night. It was a great success, and I very much look forward to any subsequent meetings we can scrape together. As a brand new teacher who recently visited Palestine and Israel, I came home last night with many ideas on how to facilitate meaningful communication amongst this conflict-torn region’s school population, as well as ways these students might be taught to empower themselves and bolden their voices with use of film, imagery, etc. Thank you so much for a wonderful evening!”

Find more creative educational resources for teachers at ITVS’s Community Classroom

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.

Ultimately, we just couldn’t decide, and so we left it up to you, our audience, to choose the winner. And you chose Negussie Tirfessa, a physics professor in Manchester, Conn. Cordelia Vahadji, who nominated him, wrote that Professor Tirfessa inspires in his students “a passion and reverence for scientific investigation.” Next week we’ll feature a conversation between Cordelia and Professor Tirfessa and learn more about what makes him the Best. Teacher. Ever!

Thanks to all who participated in the contest and shared their stories of these life-changing educators. Now, go and relax … it’s summer break!

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.

But what I best remember was that Mrs. Janulaw was the first adult to recognize and encourage my incorrigible sense of humor. Many kids then brought lunches that contained sodas (it was the 70s, we didn’t know!). I knew my mother never packed a soda in my Emergency! thermos (it was orange juice, milk or – oddly – iced tea), but Mrs. Janulaw couldn’t have known. I would pretend I couldn’t open my thermos and then walk up to her for help, and shake it in front of her, as though the ‘soda’ inside would spurt everywhere (we were learning chemistry and physics!). I tricked her the first time, but she kept playing along with the same dumb joke for months.

I also remember when the class thug Shannon cut in line for the punching bag in the playground one day, and I objected, perhaps loudly. Shannon proceeded to rip the strawberry-themed dress I was wearing (which my mother had made for me) clean off my body. In my tears, Mrs. Janulaw swooped me up and with the help of about 50 safety pins, restored my dignity. Shannon went to the principal’s office. My sense of justice has been guided by this ever since. Oh, and Mrs. Janulaw was also very stylish and I remember I totally wanted a flip hairdo like hers.

ITVS's Brooke Shelby Biggs, 1975

Notably, Mrs. Janulaw has gone on to teach teachers in the intervening 36 years. She founded the North Bay Science Project to teach the art of teaching science. She was for many years the chief science specialist with the Sonoma County Office of Education. Sharon has co-authored “Making Connections,” which is a publication that helps teachers implement theCalifornia Science Standards. Currently, she is the President of the California Science Teachers Association and serves on the Board of Trustees for John Denver’s Windstar Foundation.

You can find out more on her page at the Sonoma County Department of Education.

Deadline to enter is Friday, May 27. Check out contest guidelines here.

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.

We want to celebrate those life-changing teachers. Send us the name of the teacher in your life — along with the school, the year, the city or town, and what you remember about that teacher — that made you nominate him or her as your Best. Teacher. Ever.

Post your nominations through comments on Facebook or email them to classroom@itvs.org (We encourage you to include a relevant photo or video if you have one.)

Our winning teacher and our four runners up will each receive one of our great prizes, including a Kindle from Amazon.com, autographed film posters, full-length films from our Community Classroom collection, and lots more. We will also profile the nominee, as well as the student or colleague who submitted the nomination, on our blogs.

Join us in celebrating teachers that make a difference!

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.

We have produced two lesson plans with accompanying film modules that explore the long-term and often hidden effects of war on women and families — financial despair, increased susceptibility to rape, and social ostracism. They also ask students to consider what it means to become an active advocate for a peaceful and hopeful solution to conflict.

Lessons are directed toward high school and college students.

Subject areas: Current Events, Geography, Global Studies, Government, Political Science, Social Studies, Sociology, Women’s Studies, and World History.

Find more about the lesson plans and Community Classroom here.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.