Challenging Material

The team of educational consultants working on these lessons put together a solid set of ideas for teachers to follow. Back in December of 2002, Bill Moyers interviewed Albert Maysles, a documentary filmmaker. The lesson plans put students in the position of filmmaker, asking them to make a few observations about Maysles’s techniques and then create their own film in his style.

Thorough steps and several options along the way go far toward providing something that teachers can put in place, feeling good about marching their students down the path toward creating the final product suggested.

Weak Organization

The plan references an episode of Bill Moyers NOW, something only available on VHS. Not that big a deal, but worth consideration. The mention of the NOW episode comes with a link to the ShopPBS store. Once at the store, teachers will have to search for the appropriate episode; instead, that link should lead directly to the episode under discussion.

Skipping the purchase of the video means that I miss the Moyers interview (the only person I like better at interviews is Terry Gross, so I don’t take missing that Moyers interview lightly), but the free transcript sits online, waiting for you or your students to read it.

And if I don’t spend the $30, there are clips of Maysles’s films online. I may not be able to show the students an entire film, but they should be able to get the idea behind the techniques from these clips. Add to that the fact that the clips are available for students to view whenever they want and things are looking pretty good.

The clips are not too easy to find, though. Currently, there’s a dropdown box next to “More on This Lesson” (or “More on This Story,” depending on your current page). The contents of that box change as you go from page to page. To find the link to the Maysles clips, you have to navigate a few pages away from the lesson plan.

There must be a better way to organize all these links. It took me far too much hunting and pecking for the additional materials the planning team has worked so hard to provide.

Still, these plans look to be among the best I’ve found online. Have a look at NOW for Educators and let me know what you find.

P.S. This is post #200. Thanks for reading.Similar Posts:

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Hurricanes And Butterflies

The lack of that awareness is what causes knee-jerk responses like the Deleting Online Predators Act; students don’t realize that what they type on MySpace (the butterfly wings) impacts people other than their MySpace Friends (the hurricane).

There are plenty of other hurricanes and butterflies in people’s lives, MySpace being the least of them: politics is a huge one, an arena in which most people are convinced that their participation means nothing. In reality, the apathy of the majority is what keeps incumbents in office. A more local issue is the case of students who throw their trash on the ground. Do they realize that they’ve created more work for someone else to clean up? Do they even think of that? Would they care? But would they care if it meant their friend had to clean it up? Would they care if they knew the janitor personally?

Not recognizing that that there are others all around them influenced by their decisions is a huge mistake and one that needs correcting before they leave high school. If all students know are their lives, then their actions don’t extend any further than that. By reading details of life outside their usual routine, students can begin to see how the life they lead impacts the lives of others. They can even begin to see how larger issues, like US foreign policy or the Kyoto Treaty or even the person they elect as city mayor, impact the lives of others. Without a lense to view the rest of the world through (reading), we cannot expect students to care about the lives they never see.

Friday: MaturitySimilar Posts:

• Refuse To Spoil: Irrelevance Is Best, Part 5
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• Read Away Selfishness: Irrelevance Is Best, Part 2
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• Two Students Walk Out Of Class

Among other problems, this vague bill sends only 5 suggestions to the FCC in order to help them create a definition of “social networking websites” and “chat rooms” within 120 days of the bill’s passing. Those are two terms undefined in the bill, even though the definition of those two terms should weight heavily in one’s final opinion. It’s interesting to note that nowhere in the list of 5 things to consider is the educational possibility of a site. In other words, those people doing the defining of sites to keep students and library users away from do not take into consideration the educational value of the sites blocked.

While I’m a bit late in taking action on all this, I wrote a letter to Representative Ted Poe, a vocal supporter of the bill, and to my representatives in the Sentate (use the dropdown box in the upper right corner to find yours) and House (enter your zip code plus 4-digit extension to find yours). I sent my letter to these representatives via email and mailed a paper copy to their local district offices, as well. Maybe the double hit will have some effect, maybe not. But I feel better about it.

Read the bill. Read a few postings about this. Think about it a bit. Take other people’s opinions into consideration, even those with views different than yours. Let’s talk about this. What do you think about DOPA? What do you think about my letter (below)? If not DOPA, then what? Is this really a problem that needs federal legislation to govern? Are there more serious risks to our students that we should spend time discussing? Has the MySpace threat been completely blown out of proportion?

I’ve included an excerpted version of my letter below (though you’re welcome to read the whole thing if you’d like).

———-
The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) works to push the American public education system behind the education received in private schools and in other countries. It should be reconsidered and severely reconstructed, if not utterly wiped away and a new strategy considered.

Car accidents are a terrible thing. However, we do not seek to write legislation that would remove driver’s education from the high school curriculum or forbid teenagers from driving a car. Instead, adults do our best to teach kids how to be responsible with a motor vehicle and try to model good driving habits as we can. We need to do the same thing with computers and the Internet.

If an American student emerges from high school almost completely unaware of, or unable to make proper and responsible use of, sites like MySpace, Blogger, Digg, del.icio.us, forum or discussion board services, WordPress, or social networking services, is that student better prepared or worse prepared for life than a student from another country who leaves high school with a firm grasp on those same tools?

That’s really all these sites are: tools. Education is the key to allowing students to use those tools for the best outcome. Without strong models of how to use those tools effectively, we leave students to their own devices to figure things out as they see fit. Please don’t fool yourself, or other supporters, into thinking that DOPA would mean fewer students using the sites you seek to keep them away from. It would just mean using those sites unsupervised.

Computers are here to stay and schools need to teach students how to deal with them. I am a high school teacher who makes extensive use of student blogs for work in the classroom. I also use social bookmarking sites to create an up-to-date online textbook for my students.

If someone is an alcoholic, and alcoholism is a national problem, the solution isn’t to ban liquor. The solution is to treat the alcoholism. What does DOPA do to treat the problem “online predators” represent? Does this bill do anything to capture more “online predators” or discourage such behavior?

DOPA has worthy aims. It’s horribly, terribly, frighteningly misguided. It effectively places shackles on a teacher that should not be there. We need to teach students how to use these resources. Please allow us to do so. Reconsider the implementation of everyone’s desire to keep kids safe online. Please feel free to contact me to continue a discussion about this and/or to address any concerns or questions you have. Thank you.

Education is the key, not ignorance.
———-

P.S. Why is the Senate Web site so much more aesthetically pleasing than the House’s 1995 attempt at Web design? It makes a difference; the Senate’s site is much easier to navigate and more pleasant to visit.Similar Posts:

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Anyhow, a stuffy gentleman caught my attention for some reason. From his mouth, I heard uttered the line of thinking that I very firmly believe tears away the usefulness of online resources and prevents teachers from doing their jobs. When asked about this inexpensive way for teens to get high, he said:

Kids can just search for “cheap way to get high” and get a list of options.

Well, since my computer sat waiting, I did exactly that.

However, when I visited Google and searched for “cheap way to get high,” a recipe for poppy seed tea, a page extolling the virtues of garlic, and guidelines for home wine making were the first 3 results. The other results that followed were equally innocuous. The next page of 10 results were much the same.

In short, a search for the phrase the stuffy gentlemen said would surely lead any innocent teen down the road to illicit drug use turned up nothing of the sort.

I’ve been surfing the Web since I was a teenager. I never found anything I didn’t want to. I never “stumbled” across a drug site; I never “accidentally” discovered a site describing how to make a bomb. Yet the fear mongers continue today, as they did back then, to promote the idea that the Web is a place wayward teens run across horrible images, terrible information, and murdering strangers. And they do it all on accident because the Internet doesn’t have enough restrictions to protect young surfers. The Internet is a leviathan waiting to devour our teens who are not smart enough to navigate the waters. To these folk, the Internet is the modern equivalent of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, something to steer clear of and something that holds potential for all kinds of awfulness. Do not eat that fruit, teenagers.

Schools and districts remain willfully ignorant and choose to let the fear mongers decide for them an Internet policy. Blogs? Wikis? Instant Messaging? Email? Gone. No need to consider how those tools can be used for the educational good. No need to evaluate the gray areas. The fact that the possibility for misuse even exists is enough to dismiss the tools outright. So our kids grow up in schools that are afraid to give them the tools they need in order to be successful in life.

And it’s not enough to urge school districts to forbid the use of those tools. No, no. Some districts might decide to actually make use of those tools and allow our teens access to the writhing pit of Internet traps. That’s a freedom some folks don’t want local administration to have.

There’s legislation underway that will outlaw the use of these tools. That’s right, some in the federal government want to require all school districts to agree with their interpretation of which sites promote learning. And if districts go against that interpretation, they will be in violation of a law.

I’m not sure of the punishment, but it certainly isn’t a freshly-baked batch of cookies. And district offices, those willfully ignorant folk I mentioned earlier, would often be too afraid to stand up to government policies in order to advocate for their right to choose what’s best for their students. Instead, I venture to guess that most districts would roll over and let any outside agency determine their Internet policy.

But honestly, what are the perils of surfing? With teachers in the room, using computers on campus, under constant supervision, what could possibly go wrong? Just about anything a student could chance to see online in a brief flash is probably not even half as bad as what can be heard when walking across the campus during lunch. And any worthwhile teacher would pay attention to the type of content their students are consuming. So what’s the problem? Shouldn’t teachers be trusted to teach and make use of any tools they see fit? Does this type of legislation enter the realm of legislating curriculum? Are there real perils that necessitate a federal ban on things like blogs in the classroom?Similar Posts:

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