Shaking it Up at Mulholland Middle School

TeacherTube welcomes new members from the San Antonio-Austin Area Geographic Educators (SAGE). We look forward to seeing your instructional videos in the community and want to hear how you are using TeacherTube videos in your classrooms.

Speaking of how members are using TeacherTube in the classroom, we were super-excited to see this documented in Bob Sipchen’s April 16th LA Times column School Me—Adventures in Education. In his article “If wired right, computers do belong in the classroom,” he describes integration of technology for teaching and learning going on in a classroom at Mulholland Middle School in Van Nuys:

When a good teacher and good technology get together, watch out.

Hillary Zana's sixth-grade social studies class seems like a case study. Her students had just watched an online video clip from teachertube.com about education in the age of globalization, and they were answering questions — online, for all to see and discuss — about technology's role in classrooms.

What Sipchen observed was students visiting Mrs. Zana's Class--A Place to Read and Write
Together to watch the Shake it Up video (posted to TeacherTube by bionicteaching) and then posting responses to open ended questions. Ms. Zana continued to question students’ posts,
stretching their thinking. The class ended up with a total of 43 posts for this discussion over 3 days! I wonder if they--students and teacher--would have written this much and put this much thought into the assignment if it was on paper. But the best part of such an activity is now other students and teachers can see their responses, watch the video, and join the conversation.