Updated Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS) Web Site

Colleagues,

The Media Library of Teaching Skills (MLoTS) http://mlots.org has just been re-designed to make it easier to use. MLoTS is a collection of free adult education (ABE, ESOL/ESL and other pre-college basic skills for adults) professional development videos. Think of it as a "video window" on other adult education teachers' classrooms. These videos can be used by professional developers for face-to-face, blended or distance learning courses or workshops. They can also be used by individual teachers on their own or in small groups, for example, at their programs. The videos are short, ranging from about 4 minutes to 15 minutes, and are actual lessons recorded in authentic classrooms. These are not designed as "best practices" videos, although some do use best practices, but instead are designed to engage teachers in looking at other teachers' practice and also thinking about their own, ideally in face-to-face or online real-time meetings with colleagues. Our videos also now appear on our MLoTS YouTube channel, but it does not include the supporting documents, only the videos.

One intriguing way to discuss these videos is to watch them online in real time with other other teachers in your program, your community, or your state using Google Hangouts or other software that allows teachers to log on at the same time, view a video together, and then discuss it. Typically this kind of discussion, including watching the video, takes from 20 to 45 minutes.

In addition to the videos my colleague and I have made of classes in Massachusetts and Vermont, many of which are aligned to state adult basic education standards in those states, we also have MLoTS web pages with links by category (Basic Literacy, ESOL/ESL,Family Literacy, Integrating Technology, Math, Reading and writing) to others' professional development videos, some of which are authentic classrooms and some not, but all of which focus on adult basic education.

If you know of good online videos that you think we should include in the Other Adult Learning Videos pages, please let me know.  If you have comments on the videos you could leave them on the MLoTS web site or on the MLoTS YouTube channel. If you have questions or comments you would like to share here, that's fine too.

If you want to watch an MLoTS video from your school or program, but YouTube Videos are blocked there, you can download and save the video(s) to a flash drive or other portable hard drive and load them onto a computer desktop and, if you like, show them using an LCD/multimedia projector. Let me know if you need a list of free software for downloading YouTube (and some other) videos.

David J. Rosen

djrosen123@gmail.com