Teaching with movies is great, and teaching with edited movies is even better. Recently I encountered a website, Teach With Movies, that provides a way to use movies as an effective teaching method. This is a great way for teachers to supplement lesson plans for students K-12:
TeachWithMovies.org offers Movie Lesson Plans and Learning Guides to 285 movies. “Learning Guides” are flexible tools for teachers providing background, discussion questions, links to the Internet, projects, and vocabulary lists. They allow teachers to quickly and easily create lesson plans suitable for their particular classes. “Movie Lesson Plans” are more formal and add lectures, student handouts, comprehension tests and answer keys. TeachWithMovies.org Learning Guides cover most areas of the K – 12 curriculum. Use the storytelling power of Hollywood to motivate, inspire, and educate students. Each recommended film contains lessons on life and positive moral messages.
Why use just movies? Let’s go one step further and use edited movies, which are movies where the vulgar language, sexual content, and gory violence has been removed. You can edit your own movies by ripping the movie to your computer hard drive via AnyDVDHD, converting the files via TMPGEnc XPress, editing via Sony Vegas Video, and DVD creation via Sony DVD Architect. Then just burn the finished edited movie on a DVD-R. While I still advise to steer clear of R rated movies, this is a great way to edit your PG-13 and PG rated movies. You can be sure that movies are safe in your home so that your children will not pre-maturely encounter vulgar language in children’s movies such as Shrek, Harry Potter, or Jumanji as well as many Disney movies that are no longer family friendly. By using this method to editing movies, you can turn those PG movies with vulgar content into movies that can safely be viewed by the whole family.
If you think that a PG movie is harmless, try watching the PG-rated movie, Top Gun. While you do, count the vulgar words [way over 100 vulgarities and still counting].
Related Posts:
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
Edited movies are awesome. Some people do a great job of making the world a better place. I will now order your book so that I can edit the PG movies I have in my home.