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.
  
  

Podcasts: The 21st Century Version of the Radio Show

You’ve probably heard or read the word podcast. Radio and television shows urge their audiences to subscribe to their podcasts for the latest updates. Newspapers suggest readers visit their podcast pages to find digital connections to the stories they print. Podcasts do not have to be published by mass media organizations however. It’s just as likely though that you’ll find a podcast by a colleague, your public library, or students you’ve taught.

To provide some background, let me explain what a podcast is. A podcast is a series of audio broadcasts that is distributed using an RSS feed. You can think of it as the 21st century version of a radio show. In fact, many radio stations and radio production companies post their radio shows online as podcasts. Chicago Public Radio, for instance, posts episodes of This American Life as podcasts, and my local public radio station, WILL-AM, posts podcasts of all the daily agricultural reports.

I should note that people do misuse the term podcast. In technical terms, an individual audio file that is not distributed by an RSS feeds is not podcasts. It’s just a basic audio recording. Such stand-alone audio files can be useful and fun, but for this week, I’m focusing on legitimate podcasts only. True podcasts provide new, ongoing resources while single audio files are one-time publications.

You subscribe to the RSS feed of a podcast and then download and listen to each episode using an audio player like iTunes or Windows Media Player. You can find complete instructions for the process using iTunes from the Apple website.

For an even better explanation of podcasts and how they work, watch this video from The Common Craft Show:



Now that you know what a podcast is, how do you find ones that you are interested in? If you use iTunes to listen to podcasts, you can visit the Apple Store, click on the Podcasts link, and begin finding the latest podcasts that have been published. There are similar ways to find podcasts in other audio players, but I use iTunes.

There are online sites you can visit to explore directories of podcasts. You can search through and find anything you like on sites like these (listed alphabetically):

Podcast Alley: http://www.podcastalley.com/
Podcast Pickle: http://podcastpickle.com/
Podcast Ready: http://www.podcastready.com/

There are also sites that list educational podcasts, such as the Education Podcast Network (http://epnweb.org/).

You can also seek out podcasts at the sites of professional organizations that you already know as well. Organizations like the American Library Association, the International Reading Association, and International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) all have podcasts that might interest you.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t share details on two monthly podcasts published by ReadWriteThink each month: Chatting About Books: Recommendations for Young Readers and Text Messages: Recommendations for Teen Readers. In Chatting About Books, host Emily Manning chats with kids, parents, and teachers about the best in children’s literature for ages 4 through 11. Discussions include reading tips and fun activities to do with children before, during, and after reading.

Text Messages podcasts provide book recommendations that adults can pass along to preteen and teen readers. Each episode features one in-depth recommendation plus suggestions of several other related books, audiobooks, or films that will engage and excite teen readers.

If all this discussion has gotten you thinking about how you might use podcasts with students, find some extra inspiration in the English Journal article “The Book Report, Version 2.0: Podcasting on Young Adult Novels.”

Still Letting TV Work for You

This week’s Inbox Ideas section focuses on journalism in the classroom, in celebration of CNN’s debut as the first television news network on June, 1980. As I searched for related articles for the column, I stumbled upon a January 1967 English Journal that discussed using television analysis. Robert Meadow’s “Get Smart: Let TV Work for You” (56.1, pp. 121–124) begins with observations as relevant today as they were 40 years ago:

I’ve quit lying to my students about my television viewing habits. I watch television like a hawk. This medium brings me some of the finest art of the twentieth century—and some of the worst. I think I can tell the difference. The trouble is that my students often can’t. They think viewing’s [sic] a passive process; and they sit there sopping it up to the point of saturation. Then it just sloshes through them, having little impact, raising little response. I search for ways to put them back in touch, to give them critical tools, to make them realize that art is somehow an interactive process, that creation and appreciation cannot exist apart. Art is always a dialogue, and it is as effective as are the participants' communication skills. (121)

Today’s students are savvy viewers, able to flip from channel to channel while checking mentioned URLs on screen and IMing friends to discuss what they see. These students are highly literate consumers of video texts, yet they have much more to learn. Following Following M. A. K. Halliday’s paradigm, they have learned the language of these texts fairly well—they have learned to listen and view the text and use it in ways in their daily lives. These students still need to attend to learning about the language (as they try to figure out how these video texts work and critique their impact), and learning through language (as they use these video texts to learn about or do something).^*

Meadow’s article goes on to outline a simple activity that leads to the kind of deeper literacy engagement that moves students beyond simply learning the language of the television shows that they watch. The strategy requires little updating to be used with television shows students watch today. Some of the examples need refreshing, but the technique could work in any classroom, at any level. To summarize the activity, students work in small groups, each group watching a specific television show and noting details about characterization, plot, and other features. With observations complete, groups collaborate on a script that casts the television characters in the roles of a familiar story (e.g. Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks). Students then rehearse the script and perform their work for the class.

In the article, students cast the characters of television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, and Bullwinkle in these roles. To use the activity today, you’d simply choose more recent television shows that are appropriate for students’ academic level. Reality TV shows might be awkward to work with, but most contemporary cartoons, sitcoms, and dramas would work. Younger students might focus on the characters and plots of Spongebob Squarepants, Drake and Josh, and Hannah Montana. Older students could explore the roles in The Office, ER, and Survivor. You might also widen the story models to go beyond Grimm Fairy tales. Other than that, the same activity works today, 40 years later. It’s a great example of how you can still let TV work for you in the classroom to foster deeper critical thinking and support 21st century literacy skills.

---

^* Halliday, M. 1980. “Three Aspects of Children’s Language Development: Learning language, Learning through Language, Learning about Language.” In Oral and Written Language Development Research, Y. Goodman, M.H. Haussler, and D. Strickland (Eds.), 7–19. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Helping Families Support Readers

Encouraging families to support children and teens as readers is important—whether your community is getting ready for a Big Read project or you’re just encouraging students to keep reading when they are at home. The Why Summer Reading? page on ReadWriteThink’s Learning Beyond the Classroom site explains, “a passion for reading and writing can help children and teens find ways to understand not only different cultures and worlds but also themselves.” Further, the NCTE Guideline “On Reading, Learning to Read, and Effective Reading Instruction: An Overview of What We Know and How We Know It” tells us:

The more children read, the better readers they become. Children read more when they have access to engaging, age appropriate books, magazines, newspapers, computers and other reading materials. They read more on topics that interest them than on topics that do not interest them.

Reading supports writing development and writing supports reading development. For example, through reading readers learn the power of a strong introduction and eventually use such knowledge as they write their own pieces. Conversely, writing develops awareness of the structures of language, the organization of text, and spelling patterns which in turn contributes to reading proficiency.

So we know that reading matters, but how can we support families who encourage children and teens to read at home?

• Share the NCTE description of What Can Family Literacy Look Like to provide families with a list of short, everyday activities that can support readers and writers.
  
  
• Read the Language Arts article “Exploring Our Literacy Beliefs with Families” to learn more about the literacy beliefs of families share with others during a series of family literacy workshops. Use the information to shape your interactions with family adults.
  
  
• Visit ReadWriteThink’s Learning Beyond the Classroom for reading and writing activities that you can share with families and other caregivers. Visit the Why Summer Reading? page on the site for a link to a printable flyer you can send home with students and share with others in your educational community.
  
  
• Be sure to show families the related booklists available on the ReadWriteThink’s Learning Beyond the Classroom grade level pages for suggested best books to find in the local library or bookstore.
  
  
• Check out ReadWriteThink’s new podcasts and videos for reviews of books for ages 4–11 and ages 12–18 as well as videos that suggest reading strategies that families can use with children.
  
  

Strategies for Teaching with Nonfiction

The Language Arts article "A New Way to Look at Literature: A Visual Model for Analyzing Fiction and Nonfiction Texts" (G) explains why nonfiction texts are important to students’ literacy skills. Nonfiction texts are a part of everyday life. Outside the classroom, there are bus schedules, instructions on microwave dinners, and websites with advice on getting the most out of video games. At school there are content area texts for every class from science to the arts. There are sports reports and the latest celebrity news to keep track of. And in a year where Americans are voting on their next president, there are political advertisements, interviews, and voting ballots to read and understand.

Nonfiction texts are truly everywhere, but for many language arts teachers, these texts are challenging to teach. Often more accustomed to the demands of teaching fiction, teachers must tap different strategies to incorporate instruction on the diction, text structures, and other features of nonfiction texts. Each of the ReadWriteThink lesson plans below models effective strategies for incorporating nonfiction texts in the classroom—with projects ranging from inquiry study to strategy lessons, and content areas ranging from social studies to science and math:

• Searching for Gold: A Collaborative Inquiry Project (E)
• Literature as a Jumping Off Point for Nonfiction Inquiry (E)
• Comparing Fiction and Nonfiction with Little Red Riding Hood Text Sets (E)
• Animal Study: From Fiction to Facts (E)
• Bridging Literature and Mathematics by Visualizing Mathematical Concepts (E)
• Finding the Science Behind Science Fiction through Paired Readings (M)
• Investigating the Holocaust: A Collaborative Inquiry Project (M)
• Picture Books as Framing Texts: Research Paper Strategies for Struggling Writers (M)
• An Exploration of Text Sets: Supporting All Readers (M)
• Family Memoir: Getting Acquainted With Generations Before Us (S)
• Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel’s Night (S)
• Exploring Language and Identity: Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Beyond (S)
• Having My Say: A Multigenre Autobiography Project (S)
  
  

The Problem with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

I know I shouldn’t, but I’m giggling over the plight of the poor Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. The poor endangered creature is nearing extinction, and here I am laughing at it. Okay, I’ll let you in on the secret. We’re supposed to laugh at this animal. There's no such thing as a Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

This fictional octopus is the object of a satirical website. The problem with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus isn’t that such hoax sites exist. It’s that students can be fooled by them if they don’t know how to evaluate sources. “The New Literacies” in this month’s District Administration explains that “25 seventh-grade, high-performing online readers, when directed to the [Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus] site in a recent study by the New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut, all thought the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus was real.”

The idea of evaluating resources isn’t new. Before online resources seemed to become omnipresent, students made plenty of mistakes choosing materials for their inquiry projects. A student might use a fictional rendering of an historic event instead of a nonfiction account. Students might choose popular magazines for research papers rather than more authoritative journals and books. As a result, in the past, teachers talked about evaluating resources with students as part of their inquiry projects.

What's different in the Internet age is that anyone can publish a relatively polished and believable site. It’s very easy to be taken in by sites that look like they refer to authoritative sources and present objective information. The democratization of online publishing means that Internet-savvy readers have to be even more careful as they evaluate the resources that they encounter.

What can teachers do to help ensure students aren’t tricked by the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus? Read the ALA’s School Library Media Research journal article “Evaluating Information: An Information Literacy Challenge” for a librarian’s perspective on evaluating online resources, and tap your school librarian for help in emphasizing the importance of evaluating sources. Go over the typical features of reliable Internet sources and talk about how hoax sites work—just as you discuss the importance of evaluating any other resource that students use in their research. Here are some materials to get the discussion started:

• The Illinois District 124 site Avoiding Fake Web Sites outlines seven steps, with example hoax sites, that students can follow to avoid being taken in by hoaxes. Exploring some of these example sites with students is one fun way to talk about the importance of evaluating sources.
  
  
• The Website Evaluation Form from ReadWriteThink asks a series of five analysis questions that students can use to determine the reliability of Internet resources.
  
  
• The UC Berkeley site Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask provides a 5-part evaluation process for online resources, with a link to an online checklist.
  
  
• For a more complete exploration of website analysis, the ReadWriteThink lesson plan Inquiry on the Internet: Evaluating Web Pages for a Class Collection outlines a series of activities students can complete as part of a larger research project.
  
  

Busting Literacy Myths

The Adolescent Literacy Policy Research Brief, published this month by NCTE, addresses six common myths about adolescent literacy and explains ways that teachers, school programs, and policymakers should adopt to help improve adolescent literacy.

• Myth: Literacy refers only to reading.
• Myth: Students learn everything about reading and writing in elementary school.
• Myth: Literacy instruction is the responsibility of English teachers alone.
• Myth: Academics are all that matter in literacy learning.
• Myth: Students who struggle with one literacy will have difficulty with all literacies.
• Myth: School writing is essentially an assessment tool that enables students to show what they have learned. (2)
  
  

For each of these myths, the Policy Brief explains the reality of the situation. For the first myth, for instance, the Policy Brief explains, “Literacy encompasses reading, writing, and a variety of social and intellectual practices that call upon the voice as well as the eye and hand.” After identifying the reality behind these myths, the Policy Brief goes on to explain four specific areas that affect adolescent literacy (2–5) and then to provide a list of research-based recommendations for effective adolescent literacy instruction (6).

All this information provides the majority of stakeholders in adolescent literacy education with information that can shape everything from classroom instruction to national education policy. Why do I say “the majority of stakeholders”? Perhaps the most important stakeholders in the students themselves. In other words, in addition to working with families, colleagues, and legislators, we need to help students recognize their own myths about literacy by exploring issues of language and literacy in the classroom. Teachers can try any of the following activities to begin busting the myths that can limit students’ performance and understanding of themselves as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

• Send students on a literacy dig. Ask them to find all the texts that they read and write. You can focus their search on a particular time period or space to make the search more manageable. For instance, students might log all the literacy activities they participate in during a 24 hour period, or they might log all the literacy activities that take place in their homes or workplaces. A literacy dig can expand students’ perceptions that “Literacy refers only to reading” and that “Academics are all that matter in literacy learning.”
  
  
• Ask students to reflect on how they learn to compose in a new space or social situation. Students might think about how they learned to write text for MySpace or Facebook that received a lot of comments, or about how they learned to write text messages, IMs, or Twitters that achieved their goals. Ask students to concentrate on a new place that they have learned to express themselves and knock out that myth that “Students learn everything about reading and writing in elementary school.”
  
  
• Have students compare the different kinds of literacy that they engage in. Have students create personal Rosetta Stones that demonstrates literacy skills that may not be obvious in the course of more traditional classroom activities. In the process, you’ll help students recognize the fallacy of the myth that “Students who struggle with one literacy will have difficulty with all literacies.” [NOTE: The linked article is available through September 30, 2007.]
  
  

It’s Not Language Error

I’m as guilty as any computer-savvy teen of sprinkling my writing with the abbreviations and shortcuts that are popular in email, online chat, IMs, and text messages. To be honest, these shortcuts don’t bother me because I like to think that I know enough about language use to avoid any embarrassing slips into emoticons, acronyms, and abbreviations in rhetorical situations where they don’t belong.

The NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing explain that “Just as the nature of and expectation for literacy has changed in the past century and a half, so has the nature of writing. Much of that change has been due to technological developments, from pen and paper, to typewriter, to word processor, to networked computer, to design software capable of composing words, images, and sounds.” Part of this change has been the development of abbreviations for the words and phrases used in digital messages. As children and teens learn to use digital tools to communicate with others, they adopt the language of the Internet—its abbreviations, diction, and grammar.

Yes, I said grammar. There is a clear system behind Internet language usage. Microsoft’s A Parent’s Primer to Computer Slang discusses some of the most basic rules behind the evolving word choice people make online. Describing Leetspeak, the article explains, for instance, how word spelling has evolved:

Numbers and symbols replace the letters that they resemble. You could write the term “leetspeak” as “!337$p34k”. The character “!” replaces the letter L, “3” replaces E, and so on. Other examples of character/letter replacement might include “8” for B, “9” for G, and the number 0 for the letter O.

Whatever the Internet language you explore, you will find very specific rules in place that govern diction. Sometimes, as is the case with leetspeak, the rules are playful substitution that creates a special code. Other times, the rules have to do with technological limitations. Many shortened word forms and abbreviations result from the limited length of text messages. If you can use “b4” for the word before, you’ve saved four characters.

Nonstandard capitalization springs from similar roots. Typing a capital letter in a text message requires two keystrokes (one to turn on caps, one for the letter), so writers opt for the faster lowercase version of the words if the meaning will not suffer. Consider the Internet abbreviation “LOL,” which stands for “laugh out loud.” In a cell phone text message, the all caps version could take up to six keystrokes, while the lowercase takes only three. In the frequently high-speed communication of text messages, writers are more likely to opt for the lower number of keystrokes.

Beyond diction and conventions, there are clear grammatical rules at play in the use of Internet slang and communication. A fun example is lolcats, images of cats (like the illustration above) that include playful captions that invoke a grammar all their own. Anil Dash has outlined some of the underlying grammar rules of the lolcats in his blog entry “Cats Can Has Grammar.” The grammar of lolcats includes attention to verb tense, pronoun use, and sentence construction. In fact, lolcats require multimedia literacy skills, as writers combine image with caption and follow conventions for font appearance, caption placement, and overall layout.

The systems that I see Internet writers use don’t indicate laziness or a lack of education. Far from it. They require complex understandings of how language works. When students use Internet language in the wrong place, we shouldn’t mark their work incorrect any more than we would mark students’ use of dialect and home language wrong. What we should do is talk about code-switching and how the uses of Internet language and Standard English contrast. In Code-Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms, authors Rebecca S. Wheeler and Rachel Swords state:

When we talk about “proper grammar”; and “good English,” we make a lot of assumptions about the nature of language. We assume that English is Standard English. We assume that Standard English is Right with a capital R, and that anything else is improper, bad, incorrect, and fractured. Indeed, we seem to believe that anything other than Standard English is pretty much not English. (5)

Their observation fits Internet language well. Articles like the Hartford Courant’s “R T33ns KO'ing Eng?” begin with the notion that there is or may be something wrong with writers’ use of emoticons, acronyms, and abbreviations in digital messages and texts. In truth, it’s not error. It's just language in use in new and creative ways. The best thing teachers can do is take advantage of this language play and explore the ways that words and phrases and clauses work in the different kinds of language that we all use.

READERS: Please take a second after reading to share some immediate feedback by clicking the comment buttons below that reflect your reaction to this entry! I’m always trying to improve the blog, and your feedback will help me make sure I’m meeting your needs.

Visualizing Literacy

The recent Washington Post article "The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It" explores the importance of supporting visual literacy in the classroom. The article suggests that “students are taught how to read and how to react critically to literature, but not about visual images” and concludes that “students today need to be taught, through images, how to think critically.”

Focusing on visual literacy is nothing new for NCTE. In 1970, NCTE members approved the Resolution on Media Literacy, urging the profession to “explore more vigorously the relationship of the learning and teaching of media literacy to other concerns of English instruction” and asking that “this exploration be made in the total context of the development of students to control and direct their own lives.”

NCTE discusses even wider understandings of literacy than the Washington Post article. The NCTE Summary Statement on Multimodal Literacies suggests the range of media that comprise 21st Century literacy. Students should be asked to think critically about still images, photos, movies, animations, drama, art, alphabetic and nonalphabetic text, music, speech, sound, physical movement, gaming, and so on.

English teachers recognized long ago that literacy means far more than simply reading and writing words on a sheet of paper. Our job is to encourage students to form wider and deeper definitions of literacy. ReadWriteThink offers three lessons that can be used to reach students at each grade level:

• Developing a Living Definition of Reading in the Elementary Classroom (E)
• Developing a Definition of Reading through Analysis in Middle School (M)
• Defining Literacy in a Digital World (S-C)
  
  

Using any of these lessons as a starting point, open up the classroom to discussions of critical reading with every sense and invite students to compose in words, sounds, images. In the process, students visualize a much stronger view of literacy, one that validates out-of-school literacy skills and prepares them with the 21st Century literacy skills they will need for success beyond their classroom days.