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.

PBS

Kim Storey is an educator, designer, and producer who specializes in creating innovative educational media for children, parents, and educators.

By Kim Storey, Ed.D.

Teaching science to preschoolers? When I first entered the field of education—and children’s television—no one thought that you could or should teach science to children that young.

Today we know that young children have great capacities to learn science concepts and get engaged in doing science. Children are naturally curious about the world and how it works, and science learning for young children starts with wondering and asking questions.

Back in the 1950s, Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, created “The Cat in the Hat” beginning reading books in response to concerns that American children were lagging behind in literacy. The Cat in the Hat revolutionized teaching reading to young kids. Now more than half a century later, it’s helping teach science to young children through the new PBS TV series and websites, The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!

Websites for Parents and Teachers

As KQED’s director and creator of the educational resources for The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, my role was to design websites for parents and teachers that extended the learning from the TV programs. Websites connected to children’s PBS programs provide another way to help parents and teachers use quality educational programming to help children learn.

PBS

The television series whisks viewers away to explore places they’ve never been before, such as diving inside flowers to learn more about the animals that depend on them to live or shrinking to bee-size to explore a hive and discover how honey is made.

The educational resources, available on the PBS Parents and PBS Teachers websites, were developed in conjunction with science educators and designed to provide young children with opportunities to explore the science ideas introduced in the programs in the contexts of their own homes, neighborhoods, and schools. Children are also encouraged to visit their local libraries, science museums, aquariums, parks, and zoos to continue their science explorations.

Parents and educators will find tips, strategies, activities, and resources to help them engage children in the types of science experiences that form a foundation for future science learning.

Look for:

• Explorer’s Guides for parents and teachers that explains what science learning and inquiry means for young children, including The Cat in the Hat’s “Top Ten Tips for Engaging Young Children in Science.”

• Activities for parents and teachers that connect programs from the series with specially designed hands-on learning experiences. Activities also include video clips from the programs, definitions of science words, recommendations of books and other resources, and ideas for extending children’s science experiences and learning.

• Viewing Tips for parents and teachers to help promote children’s active viewing and learning from the series and connect the science ideas in the episodes with children’s learning experiences at home, in classrooms, and during outdoor explorations.

• Online Games available on the PBS Kids website for that provide kids with more interactive ways to explore the science concepts in the programs and activities.

The Explorer’s Guide and Activities are also available as PDFs for easy downloading and printing.

The TV Series

At the beginning of each The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That! adventure, Sally or Nick poses a question about the natural world. Although the Cat knows a lot of things, he doesn’t know everything and he’s also curious to learn more. In one program, for example, Nick wonders what it would be like to live in a tree all the time. Sally exclaims, “No one can live their whole life in a tree—It’s impossible!” The Cat responds, “Impossible? Is that so?” And off they go to the jungle in the Cat’s one-of-a-kind contraption, the Thinga-ma-jigger, to look for animals that live in trees. It’s this insatiable curiosity that sparks the friends’ adventures.

In each program, the Cat in the Hat and his friends Sally and Nick go on a science adventure such as flying with birds to discover how and why they migrate or taking a snowcat to the Arctic to explore freezing and melting. Guided by the Cat, the children figure things out by engaging in science inquiry. They ask questions, make observations, make predictions, plan investigations, collect data, make discoveries, and generate and discuss ideas about how the world works.

The television series, which premiered nationally on PBS last month, featuring of course the Cat in the Hat, along with his friends Sally and Nick, use Seussian wit and whimsy to spark a love of learning and an interest in science in preschool-age and Kindergarten children. The first season includes 40 half-hour episodes, and each episode includes two animated adventures, along with short animated clips.

The show is voiced by actor Martin Short and produced by Portfolio Entertainment Inc. and Collingwood O’Hare Productions, in association with Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Random House Children’s Entertainment, Treehouse, and PBS KIDS.  The presenting PBS station is KQED.