Watch this wonderful news report here!
So, each school year I like to choose an area in which to try something new in my classrooms. Something that's a challenge and could go really wrong . . . or really right. This year it's multi-media student productions - primarily video. I guess I am so drawn to this because I see our world as increasingly media/information oriented. We all know that our students are rabid consumers of media - the good, the bad and the ugly. I think it's awesome, because I see my students guiding much of their own learning by following the information threads that interest them most.
But I don't want my students to only be consumers of information - I want them to produce it as well. The internet is a beautiful things because it's two-way, unlike television. That means young people can contribute to the intellectual conversations that are happening in cyberspace - whether social, political, literary, scientific, anything! If the days of textbook head-filling are really gone, then we need to begin to see students (and ourselves) as the producers of intellectual media. (For more on this idea, see Douglas Rushkoff's book Program or be Programmed.
And it's become so much easier to do because the cost of the technology has gone down while the quality has gone up. All the tools are accessible to many schools. What are the hurdles? For me they were 1) a lack of personal facility with video equipment and editing software and 2) the ubiquitous lack of time in every teachers schedule.
The latter I dealt with by making the uncomfortable decision to let go of a little of my Must-Cover-Lots-of-Content mindset. That's a topic for another blog post.
The former I dealt with by signing up for a summer teacher workshop called Using Video Production in Your Classroom, run by the local treasure RETN (Regional Educational Television Network). The five-day course gave me the skills and the confidence and, more than that, the flame under my butt to really go for it this year. Wonderfully, RETN also loans equipment for free to teachers who have been trained through them. Bonus!
I decided to make my 9th grade students my guinea pigs. Our first project: The Odyssey Video Project. I learned that the students would be reading Homer's Odyssey in their Language Arts class, so I decided they would explore some aspect of the historicity of the epic tale. We created groups of 2-3 and I set the students loose to begin researching and identifying the focus of their video project.
I'll get more in to the process of the project in my next post, but for now here is the result: a playlist of 6 videos of varying degrees of quality from my 9th grade students! Please watch and post any feedback to me.
The other "create media" projects this year have been blog curation by my seniors in Ecological Economics, and podcast production by both seniors and 9th graders. More on those later as well!
Saturday, December 7, 2013
Saturday, November 30, 2013
The Greatest Adventure Begins with a Single Step
I suppose the title of this post refers to both the adventure of teaching, and the adventure of blogging. While this blog will focus on the wild ride of teaching high school students in the 21st Century, the act of actually sitting down to write my first blog post is a first, single step for me as well. It's a step that has been long in the coming and, I hope, will be part of a great adventure of processing my own experiences in a community of friends and teaching professionals.
A bit about me. I've been teaching at the high school level for fourteen years now; ten of those at a magical little school in South Burlington, VT called Vermont Commons School. My first four years were spent cutting my chops at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn - not a long stint by any means, but long enough to get a taste of what it's like to teach in a massive, bureaucratic school system. I loved the students I got to work with each day (mostly recent immigrants from the West Indies) and I appreciated my hard-working, devoted colleagues, but I had very little love for the NYC school system, the way it treated its students and employees, and the systemic shackles that kept teachers bound to a micro-managed curriculum. We were expected to be automatons rather than creative, inspired professionals.
I left the school system after four years, not because I was fleeing the NYC Board of Education, or the fate I saw in the cynical, defeated, just-get-me-through-to-retirement eyes of my 30-year veteran colleagues - but because my wife and I wanted to begin a family somewhere outside a major city. We settled on beautiful Burlington - the "big city" of Vermont - and I began my job search. I scoured every public high school within an hour's drive of the city and turned up a very frustrating nothing. Almost by accident, I stumbled upon the information for Vermont Commons School. I was committed to the public school system, but I decided to give a desperate call to the school and try my luck.
My life basically boils down to a long series of lucky breaks, and I count that phone call as one of my biggest. "I'm calling to see if you happen to need a Social Studies teacher." "You called at the perfect time. A position just opened up!" It turned out one of the two Social Studies teachers had just informed the school that she was leaving. A resume and a visit later, and I was hired.
If there is spectrum opposite of the behemoth bureaucracy called the NYC school system, it is Vermont Commons School - small, nimble, focused on the needs of everybody in the community, and founded on a trust in its excellent teachers to create their own magic in the school.
That is the fertile ground into which I was planted ten years ago. The freedom and encouragement that I have received from administration and faculty has nurtured my innovative spirit, allowing me to follow my teaching passions, to try, to fail, and to try again. I feel like I am still only at the very beginning of this adventure of discovering what it means to be a teacher in the 21st Century and, more than that, to be a learner.
I look forward to sharing this adventure online with the assumption that you are also on a professional journey of your own, and with the hope that we can learn from each other as we take our steps.
A bit about me. I've been teaching at the high school level for fourteen years now; ten of those at a magical little school in South Burlington, VT called Vermont Commons School. My first four years were spent cutting my chops at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn - not a long stint by any means, but long enough to get a taste of what it's like to teach in a massive, bureaucratic school system. I loved the students I got to work with each day (mostly recent immigrants from the West Indies) and I appreciated my hard-working, devoted colleagues, but I had very little love for the NYC school system, the way it treated its students and employees, and the systemic shackles that kept teachers bound to a micro-managed curriculum. We were expected to be automatons rather than creative, inspired professionals.
I left the school system after four years, not because I was fleeing the NYC Board of Education, or the fate I saw in the cynical, defeated, just-get-me-through-to-retirement eyes of my 30-year veteran colleagues - but because my wife and I wanted to begin a family somewhere outside a major city. We settled on beautiful Burlington - the "big city" of Vermont - and I began my job search. I scoured every public high school within an hour's drive of the city and turned up a very frustrating nothing. Almost by accident, I stumbled upon the information for Vermont Commons School. I was committed to the public school system, but I decided to give a desperate call to the school and try my luck.
My life basically boils down to a long series of lucky breaks, and I count that phone call as one of my biggest. "I'm calling to see if you happen to need a Social Studies teacher." "You called at the perfect time. A position just opened up!" It turned out one of the two Social Studies teachers had just informed the school that she was leaving. A resume and a visit later, and I was hired.
If there is spectrum opposite of the behemoth bureaucracy called the NYC school system, it is Vermont Commons School - small, nimble, focused on the needs of everybody in the community, and founded on a trust in its excellent teachers to create their own magic in the school.
That is the fertile ground into which I was planted ten years ago. The freedom and encouragement that I have received from administration and faculty has nurtured my innovative spirit, allowing me to follow my teaching passions, to try, to fail, and to try again. I feel like I am still only at the very beginning of this adventure of discovering what it means to be a teacher in the 21st Century and, more than that, to be a learner.
I look forward to sharing this adventure online with the assumption that you are also on a professional journey of your own, and with the hope that we can learn from each other as we take our steps.
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