Featured Blog: Film English

I stumbled across this blog tonight: Film English via Richard Byrne's blog. The Film English blog won a 2011 EduBlog award for Best Individual Blog, so I had to check it out. Let me tell you, it's incredible! The blog boasts a diverse amount of short films that all teach unique ideas: critical thinking, developing passions, creativity, social justice, human rights, writing, empathy, grammar, vocabulary, conservation, ecology...I could go on and on. Not only does each post contain multiple short video clips and images, each post contains step by step lesson plans for how to utilize this in the classroom. Posts are labeled by age appropriateness and difficulty. This teacher is committed to using film creatively to promote critical thinking and language acquisition. I can't wait to use a few of these in my own classes!

Creating Your Own How-To Videos

Tired of explaining how to use some piece of technology over and over again? Here's a simple fix: record a tutorial video demonstrating how to complete a task using Jing.

Jing is an easy, free downloadable program that allows you to record a tutorial type video on your computer. The program takes a video of what you are doing on your computer---so you can demonstrate where to click, what to open, etc. At the same time, it records your verbal instructions creating a pretty slick tutorial video that can be easily shared with others. Here's a sample video I created to teach my 9th graders how to create a Google Site.

Applications:

• Use it to explain how to complete a technology task
  
• Teachers can pull up an essay or other assignment on their computer screen and record their oral feedback while pointing to specific portions of the assignments and then send the link back to the student
• When you're sick or can't be at school, use it to explain what you want your students to do and send it to them so there are no confusions what they are to be doing