Video Paper Builder - Professional Development

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Professional Development

Authorship and Collaboration

VPB is being used as part of the Seeing Math Telecommunications Project, fostering teacher professional development through multimedia authorship at sites throughout the US.

Project LOCAL

In August 2004, the US Department of Education funded Project LOCAL (Learning Our Community's American Lore) through the federal "Teaching American History" initiative to encourage the teaching of traditional American history. Project LOCAL (http://ase.tufts.edu/local/) is a three-year collaboration among Tufts University, the Shore Educational Collaborative (Chelsea, MA), and the school districts and historical societies of Everett, Medford, Revere, Somerville, and Winthrop. The long-term product of Project LOCAL is an online collection of video-based teaching cases (created using VideoPaper Builder 3 and hosted by Tufts) that exemplify discrete practices of "doing history," a methodology that was collaboratively defined by faculty from Tufts, Brandeis University, and MIT to identify the professional work of historians and anthropologists. Teacher projects in 2004-5 include high school students collecting oral histories of Afro-American residents of West Medford, 10th graders leading 3rd graders on walking tours of Somerville, 5th graders leading 3rd graders in exploring the history of school sites in Winthrop, high school students examining 3 decades of yearbooks in Revere, and high school students producing a 20-minute documentary of Everett.

Click here to visit the videocase library. (Opens in a new window)

Teacher Mentoring

VideoPaper has been used as a tool for teacher mentoring in the Boston Public Schools. In the spring of 2003, two pairs of veteran teachers and novices discussed together the footage of the novice's classroom that had been edited by the novice, using Apple's iMovie. The discussion was then transcribed and used to annotate the footage. CDs of the videopapers were circulated within the two schools as examples of constructive dialogue among colleagues.

Click here to see one of these VideoPapers. (Opens in a new window)

A Teacher's Use of VPB

This VideoPaper was created by Dana Lehman, an 8th grade science teacher, during the Tufts University Education Department summer workshop on VideoPapers in July, 2002. The paper, called: "The Roller Coaster Lesson: A Study of the Conservation of Energy" is a look at one teacher's attempt to combine teacher driven discussion, student-student discussion, writing, and hands-on activities to create student engagement and real learning.

Click here to see Dana's VideoPaper. (Opens in a new window)

A Teacher/Researcher Collaboration: Mathematical Conversations

Jesse Solomon and Ricardo Nemirovsky
TERC and City on a Hill

This videopaper paper describes the flow of a 15-minute mathematical conversation in a high school mathematics classroom. The analysis attempts to elucidate how the discussion of a particular mathematical problem is inherently open-ended and to describe the complexity in managing the wide range of ideas and choices emerging from the interactions among students and the teacher. We describe such "management" by postulating that the teacher, in conjunction with some of the students, develop a "sense of direction" that is responsive to what they intuit to be valuable and mathematically significant in light of the proposed contributions. The conversation was part of a homework review and was triggered by a student who said that she could not solve a certain number sequence.

The videopaper includes the classroom film, commentaries on each vignette, and slides showing the corresponding images on the overhead projector. Some of the commentaries include paragraphs written in first person by the teacher, Mr. Solomon. They are in gray font.

Click here to see this VideoPaper. (Opens in a new window)

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Last Update: 01/05/2006 Maintainer: VPB Webmaster (webmaster@concord.org)