Education and Film

Based on a recent email: Contributing to the national and state dialogues regarding education are several films that will have screenings in our area.

THE EDUCATION THEY DESERVE

This documentary will be shown tonight, September 16, from 7 – 9 p.m. at the McCormick Tribune Center at Northwestern University.
Prefer to watch online? There's a short (11 minute), medium and full length version. Told from the perspectives of students, parents, teachers & business leaders, the film exposes striking differences between the resources and expectations that foster learning in suburban and urban high schools.

This film was produced by United We Learn, an organization founded after Rev. Meeks brought several hundred students and parents from Chicago schools to New Trier in an effort to highlight the inequity in school funding in Illinois. The Education They Deserve includes interviews with several New Trier students and two current and former teachers.

WAITING FOR SUPERMAN

From the director of An Inconvenient Truth, David Guggenheim, Waiting for Superman (trailer here) offers a critical view of the state of American schools through interviews with students, parents, and education reformers from around the nation. The film opens in select theatres on September 24.

RACE TO NOWHERE

On Sept. 30th from 7 - 9 p.m. the Glencoe PTO will be screening the documentary Race to Nowhere at Misner Auditorium at Central School. The film (trailer here) examines the effect that the pressure to achieve has on the lives of several students. The Future of Education's Steve Hargadon will be interviewing the director, Vicki Abeles on November 2nd.

FedFlix: Free Movies

FedFlix is a joint venture between the National Technical Information Service and Public.Resource.Org. 

They feature the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to the U.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors. These 258,000 + are browseable by author, title, keyword, subject, and collection. This is a part of the Internet Archive which also includes fun stuff like the Wayback Machine,
music archives, and textual archives.

"The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come."

All of these fine flix are available for reuse without any restrictions whatsoever. You are also invited to view or upload your videos to the Open Source collection! These thousands of videos were contributed by Archive users and community members. These videos are available for free download. It is suggested to "select a Creative Commons License during upload so that others will know what they may (or may not) do with with your video."

Browsing this collection is great fun. It definitely should be added to our library web reference collection.