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Documentaries with a Point Of View - POV from PBS

A National Preserve of Documentary Films about American Roots Cultures streamed with essays about the traditions and filmmaking. The site includes transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites.

Digital Nation is a multiplatform project that includes this interactive Web site and a one-hour FRONTLINE documentary to air Winter 2010. The project aims to capture life on the digital frontier and explore how the Web and digital media are changing the way we think, work, learn and interact.

Archival Collection: The March of Time® From 1935 to 1967, Time Inc's newsreel series, "The March of Time®" chronicled the events of our lives. The March of Time® separated itself from its competitors using its trademark "pictorial journalism," mixing highly-produced, long-form, documentary-style stories with dramatic re-enactments. These award-winning motion pictures recorded global events and brought them to big screens around the world and then later, television. The collection also contains historic footage dating back to 1913.

"Filmmaking is increasingly being used in the classroom by teachers who understand the wants, hopes and aspirations of their pupils. Recent BBC documentary The Rise of the Superstar Vloggers was an extremely interesting insight into what many people wrongly perceive to be a frivolous activity and an easy route to fame and fortune. Contrary to popular belief, becoming a superstar vlogger involves hours and hours of researching and writing content. When we consider how popular video is with children, it becomes clear that filmmaking is the secret weapon for accelerating progress in schools. By using filmmaking as an incentive to write, pupils are working to produce the kind of media that they love, while the teacher is easily able to coerce them to improve their writing and reading using video as a constant hook. One such school who took the plunge into filmmaking is Northway Primary School in Liverpool, nominated for the Educate Awards Innovative & Creative Literacy Award. Over the course of 11 weeks, the pupils planned, drafted, edited, performed and filmed their very own adventure film based on El Dorado, the search for the lost city of gold in Colombia made famous by Christopher Columbus himself."

"I used to teach a class called photojournalism. I usually referred to it as "digital journalism," because people assumed we were a photography class. Students created videos, podcasts, documentaries, and blogs with the goal of sharing their work with an authentic audience. On the surface, this might not seem all that practical. After all, newspapers are slashing their budgets and laying off staff. Why teach an elective class in a subject that doesn't connect to a decent job market? But here's the thing: whether we feel like it or not, we are all citizen journalists. We are all researchers. We are all sharing information online and publishing it on social media. We are all curating and producing content even if only a fragment of the population creates videos, podcasts, or blog posts. Social media is a fusion of space (social) and publishing (medium). Although it can simply feel like a place to hang out, every social media platform uses elements of traditional media. Just look at the terms: subscribers, news feed, followers, publish."

"This library of academic and cultural films features collections from the Academic Film Archive and the Media Burn Independent Film Archive, as well as a selection of documentaries created by Dorothy Fadiman. In addition, films from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology are presented including those by Watson Kintner who used film to document his world travels, and the popular television show from the 1950s: "What in the World?" "

The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world's most influential creators of the digital era. presspauseplay.com @presspauseplay Facebook: on.fb.me/y4gEK1

"Below are some of the new educational video resources I have recently discovered. I am adding them to the list of top video resources I have compiled here in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. The purpose is to help teachers and students lay their hands on some useful educational documentaries, tutorials, clips and many more."

"I just returned from a conference where the organizers screened World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements, a documentary about John Hunter, the teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia whose elegant design of a classroom activity elicits the deep thinking and creative problem solving educators strive for. Hunter responded to questions with a crafted vision of teaching and touching anecdotes from his long years in the classroom. Over and over, he repeated a central theme: human interaction is at the heart of effective education. There's no app or standardized test for good teaching. (Or replacement for the kinds of things great teachers do differently.)"

"Marie Curie, Martin Luther King Jr, Albert Einstein, Sir Alexander Fleming, Mother Teresa; all of these amazing individuals have one thing in common - winning the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is one of the most highly regarded awards given to people working in the fields of literature, medicine, physics, chemistry, peace, and economics. But the Nobel Foundation is more than just an award giving Foundation, and has branched out into creating educational content related to the hard work done by Nobel Prize winners. Not only does their website contain video clips, documentaries, literature and history related to the winners, but it has over 29 interactive educational games for students to learn about key scientific, economic, literature and peace concepts."

"Breakwater Studios Ltd. presents LIFE'S WORK, a series of short documentaries that follows the stories of six master makers, exploring their craft, their process, and ultimately, their lives."

"Education-bashing has become something of a national sport in the United States. From hurling criticism about slipping test scores, socio-economic disparity, dropout rates, to raising concerns about poor teaching standards and school resources, the popular narrative is that U.S. schools are failing children. There's good reason for the pile-on: in many cases, the problems are real. While most of the conversation around education reform centers on how to address these existing issues, another point of view has been gaining momentum over the last several years. It's a point of view that is less focused on fine-tuning the current system for high performance-since the system was built in 1893 with the goal of churning out "good workers"-and more about rethinking education entirely and how it meets the world's rapidly changing economy in the information age. This topic is explored in depth in the feature-length documentary, Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance and will appear at the Tribeca Film Festival April 24. In the film, director, writer and producer Greg Whiteley casts a light on the shortcomings of established education methods by focusing on one school that's defying convention, San Diego's High Tech High. While following two ninth-grade classes for a year, with classroom instruction unlike anything you've ever seen, the doc offers some inspirational ideas for how to help students rise to the occasion of an innovation economy that requires critical thinking."

""Have you seen this video?" The Twitter message from my good friend and fellow thought-instigator Daniel Scibienski pointed me toward If You Build It, a recent PBS documentary about designer/educator/activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller persuading an underfunded school board to create a new kind of design-based program for the students at Windsor High School in Bertie County, North Carolina. What I saw affected me profoundly: students, confused and reluctant at first, gradually developing skills and abilities with tools they'd never used before, designing and building increasingly complex things; failing, trying again, improving, collaborating, and ultimately succeeding and celebrating. I, too, have a vision for a new kind of classroom. I, too, am building something radical, exciting, and even revolutionary. I want to tap the power of design thinking to transform learning in my classroom. We're bringing shop class back to my middle school -- but this time, it's digital."

"History of the Internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.