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The movement to revolutionize teacher training by showing teachers video clips of themselves in action is losing its original tool: the Flip video camera.

As the dean of Hunter College’s education school, former State Education Commissioner David Steiner pioneered the use of Flip cameras as a teaching tool. Instructors coaching teachers-in-training could offer documentary evidence of what they did right and wrong.

Now, each student at Relay, a new education graduate school that grew out of Hunter’s program, receives a Flip camera to document their lessons, according to a long article about the movement to revamp teacher education in this Sunday’s New York Times Education Life supplement. The article’s main featured a Flip video camera atop a miniature tripod.

But production stopped this spring on the low-cost, one-button, no-cord digital video camera. (more…)