Free Documentaries - Inspire Knowledge, Debate, and more.

I wanted to share today's site because I think it can be the source of fuel for a great many debates in a high school classroom.  Have your students watch one of these documentaries on Free Documentaries.org and shake them out of their "blissfully unaware" status quo.

This site offers free steaming (and promised future download capabilities) of a couple hundred documentaries.  There are several topics including history, popular culture, politics, and more.  I have previewed several of the videos and I found that I only had to watch one advertisement at the beginning.  I was unable to watch the movies in their entirety, but I assume that they are uninterrupted by ads for the rest of their duration. 

I was excited to see that well-known documentarian Michael Moore also had some of his films listed on the site, but I was unable to get them to play.  However, that does not mean that the others are of a lesser quality.  Why not use the film Santa's Workshop in your economics class to provoke discussion on cheap labor and it's moral costs.  Maybe you would use the 6-part mini series Hitler's Holocaust to give your students a chilling story of what happened during that terrible time.  Or have your health class take a look at The Tobacco Conspiracy and have a debate over business vs. general good.

What's great about documentaries, is you can use them to show first hand facts.  If you are using them to spark a debate, you can show how not all issues are black and white, or the news you hear at 7:00 each night might not be the whole truth.  Share these with your students and see what you can spark within them.