Scientist Profile: Inventor

By Almetria Vaba

Spark your students’ curiosity in engineering and technology by introducing them to the designers, inventors, and clever thinkers featured in PBS LearningMedia. Use their stories to illustrate various themes of study like the engineering design process and the impact of technology.

• DESIGNING A WHEELCHAIR FOR RUGBY

See what happens when a U.S. Paralympic athlete challenges two teams of high school students to build an automated wheelchair. Use this segment to initiate a design challenge in your own classroom. Grades 6-12

• WIND ENERGY FUELS JOBS FOR OKLAHOMA YOUTH 

How can your students affect the world around them? Use this video segment about wind energy to illustrate the real-world impact of an innovative idea. Grades 6-13+

• SCIENTIST PROFILE: INVENTOR 

Get your class excited about great ideas! Introduce them to Ryan Patterson, teen scientist and inventor of an electronic sign language translator glove. Grades 4-6

• KID DESIGNER: A COMFORTABLE CARDBOARD CHAIR

Introduce your class to this industrious young designer who demonstrates how to construct a sturdy chair out of cardboard. Grades 3-12

• A HOUSE FOR A TEDDY BEAR 

See these young learners engaged in problem solving and trial-and-error design! Consider replicating this project in your own classroom to reinforce lessons on design, construction, and experimentation. Grades K-2.

• SID’S AMAZING INVENTION 

Sid believes that he has invented the ultimate solution to putting away his toys, later to learn that his invention is actually a simple machine called a lever. Invite young learners to explore the function of a lever alongside Sid and his friends. Grades PreK-1

Flickr: Winston Avich

Rosa Parks

Celebrate Black History Month by highlighting the African American artists, educators, icons, and influential leaders that have impacted our nation’s history and culture with these PBS LearningMedia resources.

MUSIC: THE LEGENDARY DUKE ELLINGTON

Introduce your young students to the toe-tapping genres of ragtime and jazz through the story of iconic musician, Duke Ellington. This video segment from Weston Woods presents the story of Duke by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Brian Pinkney, about Duke Ellington, one of the founding fathers of jazz. When Duke Ellington was young, his parents wanted him to learn to play the piano. Although he began lessons, he was soon lured away by his love of baseball. Later, as a teenager he heard the new musical style called “ragtime” and he was inspired once again to learn to play piano. Soon, he created his own style of music using “hops” and “slides” on the piano. He became a popular entertainer with a flair that attracted many fans. Grades 1-4

HISTORY: ROSA PARKS’ CHALLENGE

Enhance classroom discussion around the Civil Rights Movement with this interview of Rosa Parks and ask your students to examine her role in the struggle for racial equality. This interview with civil rights activist Rosa Parks describes her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her refusal sparked a massive bus boycott that lasted 381 days, ending on December 21, 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation on city buses was unconstitutional. Grades 3-12

ART: JACOB LAWRENCE AND MARTIN PURYEAR

Invite your students to uncover the driving themes behind the paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series” and the elements influencing Martin Puryear’s sculpture work. In this video from Picturing America on Screen, students learn about American artists Jacob Lawrence and Martin Puryear. Inspired by the musical storytelling of West Africa’s riots, Jacob Lawrence employed in The Migration of the Negro Panel no. 57 a painted and written narrative to invoke how African-American families “came up” from the South to settle in cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Suspended above the floor and anchored by almost undetectable wires, Martin Puryear’s 36-foot Ladder for Booker T. Washington seems to float in space as it rises and abruptly narrows at the top. The artistic metaphor of a ladder not easily climbed dovetails with the contradictions in the legacy of slave-turned-educator Booker T. Washington. Grades 6-12

LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP: CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER DOROTHY HEIGHT 

Meet the woman that President Obama hailed as the “Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement.” Ask your students to consider her impact on the rights of African Americans and women. This Newshour video clip with accompanying lesson plan highlights civil rights activist Dorothy Height long career during which she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Metal.  She befriended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was present at many great moments in history. Grades 6-13+

TEACHING THE NEXT GENERATION: LUCY LANEY

Lucy Laney, an influential Jim Crow-era educator, believed it was essential to cultivate the minds of her students in order to develop intellectual leaders for the future. Invite your students to consider her philosophy of education. This video segment from The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow addresses the life and impact of Lucy Laney, the founder of the Haines Normal and Industrial School in Augusta, Georgia. Grades 9-12

Find more lesson plans and video clips from The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow in PBS LearningMedia.

Erin Scott

Today is the second annual Digital Learning Day, designated to bring attention to the benefits of technology for learning. As part of the effort, PBS LearningMedia has released a survey showing that 74 percent of teachers say educational technology benefits their classroom in many ways, including the ability to reinforce and expand content, motivate students, and respond to a variety of learning styles. Given these numbers, and despite increasing access, it’s not surprising that 68 percent of teachers still want more access to technology in the classroom. That number goes up to 75 percent of teachers in low-income schools.

To understand more about the influence of technology and learning, the following articles help shed light on subjects of discussion among educators and parents.

• 7 GOLDEN RULES OF USING TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS. 1) DON’T TRAP TECHNOLOGY IN A ROOM. “When I went to school, computers were put in a room called The Lab,” Bellow said. “‘What are they experimenting with in there, I thought.’ Technology wasn’t built into what we were doing. It was farmed off in a room, like it was special. Like we were learning how to code, and in case the Russians came, we’d know what to do.” Technology should be like oxygen, Bellow said, quoting Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of Science Leadership Academy: Ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.

• CASE STUDIES: HOW TEACHERS USE TECHNOLOGY TO SUPPORT LEARNING. Larry Ferlazzo collected an invaluable list of criteria last year from educators, to which he added more resources in his recent blog post for EdWeek.Other posts in the series include Using Ed Tech to Create Deep and Meaningful Experiences and Effective Ways of Using Tech in the Classroom. Here is MindShift’s contribution to the collection of ideas.
• TO MAKE BLENDED LEARNING WORK, TEACHERS TRY DIFFERENT TACTICS. For many schools, finding a way to integrate the use of tech in a traditional setting — teacher-centered classrooms — is proving to be a challenge. What educational software should be used? What criteria should the software be judged against? And what happens to the role of the teacher and classroom activities when students are using software for practice exercises?
• WHAT’S WORTH INVESTING IN? HOW TO DECIDE WHAT TECHNOLOGY YOU NEED.  How will technology allow students and teachers to network their learning, to collaborate with each other, to extend the reach of what kids can learn beyond the walls of the school? How can technology be used to unlock what hasn’t even been thought of yet? These questions are more difficult to answer, and less tangible to measure, than improving test scores, which is what typically draws the attention of educators.

PBS Learning Media

Re-Roofing Your Uncle's House

By Almetria Vaba

Math can be made meaningful when connected to students’ experiences. With video clips and interactive games from public media students practice math concepts while exploring real world concepts. Learn how to decorate an intricate cake, play the role of the pharmacist, roof a house and more using PBS LearningMedia resources to measure with math.

Using Recipes for Fractions Lesson Plan and Video
While doubling a cupcake recipe, students practice three ways of doubling fractions using representations, addition, and multiplication. Students also convert between improper fractions and mixed numbers. Grades 4-8.

Re-Roofing Your Uncle’s House Interactive Game
In this interactive activity adapted from the Wisconsin Online Resource Center, students use mathematics and measuring skills to solve a construction problem by playing a game using tools (including a tape measure, notepad, and calculator) to determine how many shingles are needed to reroof a house. Students also learn the importance of proper planning and how miscalculating the amount of materials necessary can add to the cost and time spent on a project. Grades 3-9.

Cake Designer Video
Math made delicious! In this video, a cake designer describes how she uses math with her recipes and designs. Students can relate the importance of mathematics to the field of cake designing. Grades 3–9.

Area of Circles with Dive Dog Interactive Game
In this animated activity students learn the formula for the area of a circle and then apply it to multiple scenarios involving Spot the Dog. Activities include solving problems involving the area of a circle and for the areas of parallelograms, triangles, and circles. Students also calculate the area of a circle using the formula and recognize the relationship between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. Grades 7-8

Dunk Tank: Area of Squares & Rectangles Video and Interactive Games
Using a combination of video and interactive gaming, each game addresses a single topic in the 6th grade math curriculum and students compete with themselves for high scores. Other Dunk Tank episodes include: Venn Diagrams; Mean, Median, Mode & Range; Ratio & Proportion; Fractions, Decimals & Percents; Liquid Volume; and Circles. Grade 6

Audrey Watters

Another ISTE attendee.

The International Society for Technology in Education held its annual conference and exhibition this week in Philadelphia. While the official headcount has yet to be released, early estimates pegged the number of attendees at over 20,000.

In lieu of our typical weekly review of ed-tech news, we’ve opted to focus instead on some of the announcements that came out of ISTE 2011.

• Educational animation site BrainPOP launched GameUp, a free resource that integrates educational games into the BrainPOP platform. The game titles include “Battleship Numberline” and “Microbes” and come from organizations like iCivics, Filament Games, and Nobelprize.org. The games focus on topics like science, math, and social studies, and like the rest of the BrainPOP materials include supplemental information for teachers such as how to use the game in a lesson, which curriculum standards the game is aligned to, as well as a link to one related BrainPOP topic.
• PBS launched PBS Learning Media, an online resource with over 14,000 pieces of digital content, including video, audio, photos, and more. The content comes from various local public broadcasting stations, as well as other public agencies, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and NASA. The site is available to teachers and parents, and the material is all tagged and searchable, so that information can be found by content type, age type or topic. See our full story here.
• ISTE itself released a white paper this week that offers a first look at ISTE’s new standards for technology coaching. The proposed NETS*C won’t be finalized until this fall, but the white paper discusses ISTE’s latest set of standards and the organization’s recommendations for helping integrate technology more fully into professional development.
• Project Tomorrow and Blackboard released a new report examining the rapid acceleration in online learning at the middle and high school level in the U.S. The survey found that the number of high school students who have been involved with online learning has tripled and the number of middle school students who’ve done so has doubled over the last three years. Furthermore, 36% of classroom teachers say that they too have taken some sort of online class. More than 40% of the students surveyed said they see online classes as an essential part of their learning experience, and more parents and administrators are starting to agree. The demand for online learning opportunities is growing, with a third of 3rd through 5th graders saying they’d like to have the opportunity.
• StudySync announced that it was expanding its supplemental curriculum from the high school to the middle school level. The company provides a library of more than 300 videos that help teach literature and writing. The video lessons serve to help students learn how to analyze and appreciate literature, and the StudySync system also includes peer-to-peer interaction, so that students learn to engage in written discussions around literature. In expanding to the middle school level, StudySync has added new level-appropriate titles, including Alice in Wonderland and Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
• Sokikom announced the launch of what it’s calling the first massively multiplayer online math game. Geared to students grades 1 through 6, Sokikom’s game lets up to 30 students in a classroom play a game together. Currently Sokikom has 3 games: Frachine, which focuses on fractions, decimals and percentages; Opirate, which focuses on algebra; and Treeching, which deals with measurement, time, and money.
• McGraw-Hill introduced CINCH, an all-digital, cloud-based curriculum for K-12 math and grade 7 through 12 science. The content is available through the browser, meaning that students will be able to access it on any Internet-enabled device. CINCH includes not just digital text but also education games, an assessment component, and social networking elements (such as commenting within the curriculum). McGraw-Hill says that the content in CINCH is customizable by districts and teachers and is aligned to Common Core State Standards.
• Interactive whiteboard maker Promethean announced a partnership with the Channel One Network. Promethean Activboards will get access to the daily Channel One news, supplemented with various interactive tools.

A LearningMedia video about energy use.

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.

Educators also have access to a range of professional development with a variety of instructional videos from subjects like co-teaching to assessing prior knowledge to innovative ways of teaching algebra.

The main site is free for educators to use, but LearningMedia will also offer another tier that’s more customized for paid users.

“We’ve refined the site based on what we learned over the past years with Teachers Domain,” Lurie said. “We always ask questions from teachers and advisers: ‘What’s hard to teach about thermodynamics, about the 14^th amendment, about balancing equations? What do you struggle with?’ And we created this as a supplemental source.”

Educators can use the site in class when embarking on a new lesson, as a prompt for a specific activity or framing a lesson with additional information. It can be used for remedial work, homework, in small groups, in middle schools or high schools. It can be used in class or at the computer lab.

“We’ve done the research and seen that it’s worked,” Lurie said. “It’s not just a matter of turning on the video, going to the back to back of classroom and watching it. It deepens the content knowledge for teachers, and gives them the ability to use the media they’ve learned and turn around and teach it to their kids. And that enables a greater degree of sophistication of pedagogy.”

Teachers Domain, which is a repository of 3,800 pieces of content, will be “sunseted” Lurie said through the fall, and PBS will launch a “drumbeat campaign” to let educators know that everything they’ve saved on Teachers Domain can still be used and accessed through Learning Media.

So far, 38 PBS stations have signed on to provide free, co-branded service, including KQED in San Francisco, which is — full disclosure — my home base.