The Media Library of Teaching Skills -- could be an opportunity to share with other teachers video clips of your online classes or tutorials

Hello Colleagues,

The Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS) http://mlots.org is a free, curated adult basic skills (including ESOL/ESL) online collection of short professional development videos. Several of the videos,  from Vermont and Massachusetts, were made by my videographer colleague, Owen Hartford, and me. Many more are adult education professional development videos made by colleagues that, with their permission, we have linked. With the coronavirus pandemic-caused phenomenon in our field of primarily online/remote/distance education, we want to include authentic online classroom and tutorial instruction videos.

If your instruction includes a real-time online class, for example, using Zoom or other videoconferencing software that has a recording feature, and you would like to send us links to: 1) video clips that you have edited yourself or 2) an entire recorded instruction session video that we could edit, we would be very glad to consider adding it to the MLoTS collection. Ideally, we'd like you to include a lesson plan to help other teachers understand the purposes/objectives of the lesson.

MLoTS provides a "video window on the classrooms or tutoring sessions" of adult education teachers/instructors/tutors. It is not intended as instruction for adult learners, nor necessarily as "best practices" for teachers, although the practices in most of our videos range from good to excellent. Rather, these videos are intended to be a way for teachers to do what they rarely can, to see what other adult basic skills education teachers do in their classes or tutorials, how they do it, and to discuss with teaching colleagues the methods, approaches and teaching skills in the videos. The MLoTS videos have also been included as examples in formal, in-person or online professional development courses and webinars.

One question that teachers who may be considering sharing a video of their students in public often have is, "What if a student doesn't want to be seen in a public video?" One answer is to tell students when an upcoming online lesson will be recorded and explain that, if they do not wish to be seen, they can turn off their video camera, or if they do not wish to be seen or heard, they can use the video-conference chat instead of the un-muted microphone feature.  They could also, as adult learners have sometimes done in-person classes, let you know that they will just not be present for that particular class session. We require that that all those in the video indicate their agreement in writing to have their image made public. In an online class this can easily be done by emailing, texting or instant messaging adult learners a standard plain language statement of willingness to have their image seen in public media that they can return with the words "I agree." Teachers, and others in the video, must also sign the agreement. Adult learners will need to know in advance that if there are others in the room with them during the instruction session, that they should turn their video-camera off for that session.

Another question we sometimes get is "Can I see the edited video(s) before they are posted and, if I am not comfortable, can I choose to not have them posted?"  The answer is yes, although all the teachers we have video-recorded so far have been pleased with the recordings. In Massachusetts, one adult education teacher we video-recorded was so pleased with the video we made of her class that she later submitted the unedited version as part of required evidence for adult education teacher licensing.

If this opportunity to share your video-recorded online instruction interests you, please e-mail me about your interest, and include any questions you might have.

Thanks.

David J. Rosen

Media Library of Teaching Skills

djrosen123@gmail.com

 

Comments

Colleagues,

The Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS) http://mlots.org is a free, curated adult basic skills (including ESOL/ESL) online collection of short professional development videos. Now that we have primarily online/remote/distance education, we want to include authentic online classroom and tutorial instruction videos.

If your instruction includes a real-time online class, for example, using Zoom or other videoconferencing software that has a recording feature, and you would like to send us links to: 1) video clips that you have edited yourself or 2) an entire recorded instruction session video that we could edit, we would be very glad to consider adding it to the MLoTS collection. Ideally, we'd like you to include a lesson plan to help other teachers understand the purposes/objectives of the lesson, but that is not required.

If you have questions about this, contact me. I look forward to hearing from you.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com