Finding Safe Videos for the Classroom

Video and film play a vital role in the 21st century classroom, and online access makes them easy to find and use. This 11th grade modernization of Snow White on YouTube demonstrate readers theater and could be used before students composed their own modern readers theater versions of fairy and folk tales:

My very favorite Schoolhouse Rock short, Conjunction Junction, is available on YouTube anytime I want to do a mini-lesson on conjunctions work “hooking up words and phrases and clauses.” If I’me teaching Hamlet, a quick search on YouTube will turn up Sir Laurence Olivier’s performance of the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy, ready to share with the class.

The problem with YouTube, as I’m sure almost everyone knows, is that there are also a lot of very inappropriate videos on the site. It’s a difficult site to turn students loose on because of the amount of guidance needed. In many districts the site is banned outright by network firewalls.

This is where sites like TeacherTube and Teachers.tv come in. Think YouTube for teachers, and you have the idea. Teachers upload student-created videos, their own instructional videos, tutorials, in-service and conference presentations, and demonstrations. TeacherTube has an American feel. Teachers.tv is the UK spin on the idea.

You’ll find resources like a book talk on the 2008 Newbery Award winner, a promotion for book clubs, and the Alphabet in American Sign Language on TeacherTube. And you’ll find a collection of videos for English and media instruction on Teacher.tv.

In addition to these two general sites, there are some specific online video collections that can be used in the classroom:

• The Moving Image Archive at the Internet Archive
  Find collections of videos arranged by genre. Some will be inappropriate; however, specific collections such as Youth Media, Classic Television Commercials, and the September 11 Television Archive have materials you can embed and use with students.
  
  
• C-SPAN
  The C-SPAN website offers more than just political news and current events. Booknotes and BookTV have video interviews of non-fiction authors. C-SPAN Classroom is includes videos on Civics and U.S. government that can provide background information and content-area resources. Presidential Libraries offers biographical information through recordings of twelve presidents.
  
  
• Google Video
  While the main Google Video site is open to uploads, you'll find specific collections suitable for the classroom behind the front page. The National Archives videos include NASA History, World War II newsreels from United Newsreels, and Department of the Interior Motion Pictures from 1917–1970. The University of California, Berkeley videos include a handful of recordings from the Lunch Poems series, featuring readings by poets such as Li-Young Lee and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Here are some final tips to help ensure that everything goes smoothly:

• Always, always, always preview the entire video before sharing it.
• Be sure that you’ve obtained permission from families and your administration.
• Watch for “related” or “popular” video links that may appear near the video you plan to use.
• Embedding a video can avoid some problems, but remember that sites like Google and YouTube include links to “Related Videos” in the video screen as well.
• Check the comments that accompany a video. The video may be suitable, but spammers and trolls may have filled the comments with inappropriate language or links.
  
  

Celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

By White House proclamation, May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! The resources below will help you explore the contributions of Asian Pacific Americans with students and ask them to think critically about how the roles and culture of Asians and Pacific Islanders have been presented in literature and popular culture.

Ask students to consider the portrayal of Asians in popular culture with the resources in Race & Hollywood: Asian Images in Film, from Turner Classic Movies. Analyze the still images and movie trailers to identify how and when Asians are included. Have students consider what happens when non-Asians are cast in Asian roles, after viewing the Asians in Hollywood, Stereotyping of Asians, or Anglos Playing Asians videos on the site.

Explore the writings of Asian American authors with these ReadWriteThink lesson plans:

• Family Memoir: Getting Acquainted With Generations Before Us taps an essay by Korean writer Chang-rae Lee as the basis of an exploration of how familly stories are told.
  
  
• Exploring Language and Identity: Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Beyond considers how language shapes (and is shaped by) how we think of ourselves and our families.
  
  
• Discovering Memory: Li-Young Lee’s Poem “Mnemonic” and the Brain asks students to dissect Li-Young Lee’s poem to consider how memory works and is represented in our writing.

Share texts written by Asian and Pacific Americans with students, whether you look to picture books for young adult novels. For starters, you can listen to the ReadWriteThink Text Messages podcast episode Teen Identity and Tough Situations, which discusses the graphic novel American Born Chinese and other books that explore characters who struggle to know when to stay true to themselves. To find other books by Asian authors and illustrators, consult these lists:

• Asian Picture Books and Asian Chapter Books, from Salt Lake City Library
  
  
• Powerful Asian-American Images Revealed in Picture Books, from Kay Vandergrift
  
  
• Asian American Booklist, from NEA

For even more resources, you can check out these sites, which offer educational, historical, and cultural materials that can be used in the classroom:

• Asian American Heritage Month,from the Library of Congress
  
  
• Asian-Pacific American Heritage, from the National Park Service
  
  
• Asian Pacific Americans Heritage Teaching Resources, from Smithsonian Education
  
  
• Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, from the Asia Society
  
  
• Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, from EDSITEment
  
  
• Asia for Educators, from Columbia University
  
  

More Resources for Exploring Movies and Literature

The English Journal article “Literature into Film (and Back Again): Another Look at an Old Dog,” written by NCTE Consulting Network member and NCTE author John Golden, describes ways to explore movies based on short stories and novels in the literature classroom. While the examples in the article are targeted at secondary students, the techniques can be applied at any level. All you have to do is change the texts. The general questions remain the same.

The key is to focus on analysis of the director’s choices, rather than on general review or comparison of the choices. Try asking students questions such as “Why did the director delete this scene? What difference does this choice make?” rather than “Which version is better and why?” ReadWriteThink has lists of films and texts that can be used in the elementary classroom and at the middle level that you can use to supplement the lists in the English Journal article.

Further, ReadWriteThink includes these lesson plans that explore literary elements in films and other videos:

• Decoding The Matrix: Exploring Dystopian Characteristics through Film
• Decoding the Dystopian Characteristics of Macintosh’s “1984” Commercial
• Exploring Irony in the Conclusion of All Quiet on the Western Front
• Exploring Satire with Shrek
• Exploring Satire with The Simpsons
• Lights, Camera, Action...Music: Critiquing Films Using Sight and Sound
• Writing a Flashback and Flash-Forward Story Using Movies and Texts as Models

Finally, in the EJ Extension “Who Wants to Be a Director?” Golden shares additional creative writing activities that students can complete to consider the ways that print texts are turned into movies. Golden suggests, for instance, that students choose songs for a movie soundtrack version of a print text that they have read. The ReadWriteThink lesson plan On a Musical Note: Exploring Reading Strategies by Creating a Soundtrack includes additional resources teachers can use as they try this creative writing technique.

The ReadWriteThink lesson Literature Circle Roles Reframed: Reading as a Film Crew offers a creative reading approach, by substituting film production roles for the traditional literature circle roles. After reviewing film production roles—such as director, casting director, and set designer—students work together in cooperative groups to read and discuss a piece of literature, each assuming a film production role.