The following represents a brief list of recommended sources for educators using visual media. Find it in Film will be updating this page on a regular basis.
Long known as unitedstreaming, this premiere service was recently rebranded to reflect the parent company that purchased it several years ago. A building-level subscription service that offers 30-day free trials, Discovery Education Streaming features indexed video segments keyed to K-12 curriculum topics and national standards as well as clear and detailed lesson plans. What’s particularly impressive is the way the company increasingly integrates its streaming video with the rest of Discovery Communication’s web resources. For example, educators can attend webinars on how to teach using high-interest TV programs that air on stations such as Animal Planet. Finally, the Discovery Educator Network is a vast and valuable resource, with each state having its own dedicated blog.
LVC’s SAFARI Montage is a WAN-based video delivery system that boasts superior quality images and an easy-to-use video management interface for educators. Like those of Discovery Education Streaming, SAFARI’s offerings are drawn from the catalogs of top-flight producers such as National Geographic, yet the service also allows districts to upload their own content. Library Video Company as a whole distributes a staggeringly wide variety of titles and products for purchase by schools and libraries. Its original titles, which are branded as Schlessinger Media, represent affordable alternatives in visual media that cross the disciplines of the core curriculum; recently, streaming clips from these have been made available on the site for free. Andrew Schlessinger, LVC’s founder, has been active in providing visual media for the classroom since the 1980s, and has been quite savvy in terms of embracing and supporting new formats and technological innovations as they evolve. The correlations to individual state standards on the Library Video Company’s Web site is also quite impressive.
The quality of this company’s titles is well-known. A recent poll in fact found that more Americans trust PBS than any other media source. What is equally impressive to Find it in Film, perhaps because we share the same emphasis on accessing content in visual media, is the incredibly granular index to curricular topics that the company has made available for free to anyone—including your students—using its titles. In addition, PBS also provides a huge range of searchable free resources for teachers; many of these include media components.
Here you’ll find informative and even inspirational clips on a wide range of topics across the K-12 spectrum. While several involve film and media education, these clips are really intended to support educators in the broadest possible sense. The searchable content categories for these streaming videos are:
Edutopia truly does a great job of vetting, organizing, and presenting these clips. This is the kind of resource that you never get tired of exploring—or sharing with others.
There is no contest here. Author and educator Frank W. Baker maintains a site that is without question the one-stop-shopping destination for media literacy. One of the great things about the site is that it’s clearly helpful to veterans of the field as well as to those who may just be starting to venture into it. Here you’ll find links to important organizations, information on standards and cross-curricular connections, and much more.
While it may take you a while to get a sense of everything this site offers, that’s in part because it’s refreshingly free of boundaries. You’ll find not only lesson plans, but also more involved group projects, assessments, and even tools such as reproducible permission slips. Classbrain, which hosts these resources, really lets the high-interest content of mainstream movies determine the teaching possibilities. The result is content and instructional strategies that are largely unpredictable and usually quite fun.
Even if you decide not to take out the annual subscription ($11.99) to gain access to the vast number of the lesson plans/leaning guides here, you’ll still want to check out this well-respected Web site. That’s because the various indices to movie titles, which you can peruse for free, may be quite valuable when it comes to choosing film titles to screen, in whole or in part, that support your curricular goals. The folks who run this site have been doing this a long time, and their experience and thoughtfulness is evident throughout. Although Find it in Film does not focus on “long-form” in-class viewings of entire movies, we really can’t help but admire this Web site as a resource for teachers who rely heavily on such an instructional model.
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