AFI Screen Education

Since launching the Lights, Camera, Education! resource last year on Discovery’s unitedstreaming.com, we’ve been thrilled at how educators have made use of the materials. Teachers all over the country are using the process and videos to enhance how they teach with videos but are also leading local professional development workshops, teaching their colleagues ‘The Door Scene’ as a means of fostering greater visual literacy and greater cooperation.

Just last weekend as AFI’s Frank Guttler was leading a 1 day workshop for both students and teachers at the International Student Media Festival in Anaheim California; Joe Brennan Discovery Star and Apple ADE was at the Sedona Center for Art and Technology in Arizona teaching ‘Lights, Camera, Education!’.

Elaine Plybon, a Texas alumni of the workshop held at the AFI Dallas Film Festival in March has been using the Screen Ed materials in her Irvine Texas USD development workshops and recently presented the first virtual AFI Lights, Camera, Education! workshop in Second Life! (More on that soon)

Joe Brennan has been an early adopter of the Screen Ed Process and the Lights, Camera, Education! series, his blog posts are a great guide to the using, learning and teaching with the AFI materials. His wisdom can be accessed at his LCE! blog.

Watch this space for more news, stories and tips for using the AFI Screen Ed process and Lights, Camera, Education! in your classrooms and professional development workshops.

Welcome to the first post in the AFI.edu blog. AFI.edu is the online home for the American Film Institute’s K-12 Screen Education program.

Long before YouTube became a household name and broadband itself was just a baby, AFI launched an ambitious mission to bring screen literacy to K-12 classrooms across America. In 2001, the mission kicked off with several face-to-face workshops for teachers in both California and Maryland. Over the next few years, we honed our program and process, continued the face-to-face teacher workshops, and enjoyed glowing independent evaluations. We also produced a two hour professional development series entitled “LIGHTS, CAMERA, EDUCATION!” hosted by Sean Astin and distributed by Discovery Education. On top of all that, we even built a website where teachers could download digital storytelling resources as well as upload their students’ videos.

That was then.

Today we live in a world where uploading digital video to the Web is practically as common a process as sending an e-mail. Affordable digital video cameras and built-in webcams are everywhere. What’s that you say? You don’t have access to a video editing program? Well there are sites and tools out there like Jumpcut and Eyespot that can help you. It’s not overstating it to say that it has never been so easy and affordable for so many of us to communicate visually to large audiences and exhibit our vision.

Kids too.

The appeal of filmmaking in the classroom is obvious. Give a kid a camera and the engagement level shoots through the roof. Video is cool. The use of video and the AFI Screen Education process gets kids making movies about what they’re learning in class. We’ve seen it first hand. Test scores go up, retention of information goes up, attendance goes up, and the fun part, lots of the videos themselves go up online.

AFI Screen Ed is evolving. Keep an eye on this blog for everything from exciting news to rave reviews of quality K-12 student films. We are very eager to see student work created in the classroom and beyond. And if you are a student filmmaker who is 18 or younger, or know someone who is, let us know about your films!