Cold November Rain...in October

Today has become one of my favorite days in the semester. Not because it's Thursday and tomorrow is a Professional Development day (which means no students). And not because Monday is Fall Break (which means no school). Today is one of my favorite days because I made a difference.

It's not that I don't try every day to impact my students. My standing on tables to demonstrate nouns and verbs, acting like a vj on a podcast to encourage critical thinking about Transcendentalism, and conferencing with students about their writing before I've had my coffee can attest to that. But it's not always that I know for certain that what I've done has left an impression.

Today, however, I know it to be true. How? It was something simple, something quick and likely seemingly innocuous to the individual responsible for bestowing this truth upon me, but right before fifth period started, as I was standing outside my classroom door, partly because I have hall duty but mostly because I had already started the Guns N Roses music video "November Rain" in my room and wanted to see my students' facial expressions as they strolled into what they falsely assumed to be a typical day in Composition, it was then that one young man turned to me ever-so-slightly and proclaimed, "I was told to look forward to this class today."

That's it. That's all it took. I had made the list. Heck, if Facebook and cell phones were allowed at school, I'd likely have been someone's status by lunch. At least, I'd like to think so. I had made such an impression that now I was circulating around the school, and not because I'd had yet another bad hair day.

And for the next ninety minutes those fifth period students engaged in learning so sneaky they probably still don't know just how much brain power they used today. They read, re-read, analyzed, identified facts, pointed out motifs, asked questions, analyzed, broke down, collaborated, synthesized, conferred, theorized, supported, argued, and evaluated. And all with a nine-minute music video.

That's the power of YouTube and Hard Rock.

The "Joys" of Mediacast: Visual Appeal?

Last year my school adopted a superb video storing program known as Mediacast. I was in on the ground level of this web-based media retrieval site, getting basic training when it was first rolled out. Now I instruct all district teachers on how to use this program.

I love it. It enables quick access to all of districts' videos. Contrast this with the days when we had to reserve an actual VHS tape or DVD via our school library and hope that it played correctly and we actually still had it someone in the recesses of the cave that was our video storage room. Today I log in, search for the title I want, then either reserve it or create a link to it so my students can access it via Moodle. It's a dream for me.

Until today. Due to licensing issues, there was only one "copy" of The Great Gatsby available. No problem. Though there are four teachers using the same video, we simply create a link and can watch the 3-5 minute clips at our leisure - or rather, however it might fit into our daily plan. (Yes, we are so aligned, we teach the same basic lesson each day.) This was impossible with the old system, where there was literally only one video and we had to get the librarian to play it from the library, which meant we couldn't time it with our individual class plans.

But today we had an EPIC FAIL. Medicast kept creating phantom "reservations" where it claimed a certain teacher had control of the one license for two hours at a time. Only that never happened. Some of the teachers it said were using it hadn't even viewed the video this year! After numerous emails and phone calls to numerous techies, the librarian, and my fellow teachers - we still haven't figured it out. So my seventh period class was without video supplements. I guess that's why they say as teachers we must be flexible.

But the truth is, even with the jostle I experienced today, I love integrating video clips into my lessons. Those short films help more visually-oriented students. Such as with our discussion today about the green light at the end of Chapter 1. The kids get the fact that it's important, but that's about as far as their minds can take them. Until they see the video clip that very clearly gives a BIG clue about its significance. And that's what I most like to see - those "aha" moments that make it all worth while.