Teachers and parents now have a huge multimedia resource to help educate kids about a wide range of subjects. It's called PBS LearningMedia, and it's a treasure trove of high-quality content from public broadcasting stations from around the country.
The new resource, a merger between Teachers Domain and the PBS Digital Learning Library, holds more than 14,000 "digital learning objects" -- videos, curricula, images, audio, and interactive sites -- collected in one spot from public media, as well as publicly funded agencies, the National Archives, Library of Congress, NASA, and Nova, among others. The site was launched at the International Society of Technology in Education conference (ISTE) in Philadelphia.
“All of these are purpose-built short pieces of video that have been produced or adapted for use in the classroom. These are not simply segments of television,” said Rob Lippincott, senior vice president of education for PBS in an article in e-School News.
The new site was created to fill in the gaps in content, said Howard Lurie, associate director of editorial products at WGBH, which spearheaded Teachers Domain and the new PBS LearningMedia.
Teachers and parents can look up subjects by topic, grade level, media type, or language. All videos are captioned. Each piece of content includes background essays written by teachers and scholars to give teachers more fuel for conversation, discussion questions, a study guide, as well as links to other relevant videos and content. And eventually, all of these will be aligned with the Common Core standards.