This Collections project is allowing WGBH to expand its current Teachers Domain Digital Library into the content areas of the Physical Sciences and Engineering. The overarching intent of the Teachers Domain Digital Library project is to get the high-quality, multimedia resources of WGBH out of their vaults and into the hands of teachers and students in a form that is directly targeted to their teaching and learning needs.
The Teachers Domain Digital Library, with its focus in the Life Sciences, is a mission-driven initiative that is harnessing the extensive broadcast, video, and interactive programming resources of WGBH to support standards-based teaching and learning at the K-12 level. The product is a searchable, web-based repository of contextualized multimedia materials that teachers are easily accessing for their own professional development as well as to enrich classroom activities for students. As is the case of the original award, the Physical Sciences and Engineering materials are being organized to reflect alignment with commonly taught classroom units and with the performance standards currently applied at both state and national levels. These multimedia assets are being metatagged and presented with extensive contextual information to allow for practical, effective use. Annotations, background essays, standards correlations, and curriculum integration supports accompany each archival resource, and features such as personalized resource bins and keyword search capacity enable ease of use and maximum impact.
This project is the result of the longstanding commitment of WGBH to the support of educational reform efforts nationwide, a commitment most common in the subject area of science. Science programming, including such series as NOVA, A SCIENCE ODYSSEY, BUILDING BIG, and EVOLUTION, is recognized to be among the finest on television and is used to support classroom teaching across the country. These shows collectively represent thousands of hours of programming and contain real world applications of abstract concepts, classic science experiments, case studies, primary source interviews, animations, and historical footage. Much of these materials have supporting teacher guides and companion web sites that extend their educational impact. In addition, WGBH has produced numerous, high-quality K-12 teacher training resources. Many of these video-based materials, including INVESTIGATING CLASSROOMS, SCIENCE FIRST, TEACHERS AS LEARNERS, LEARNING THAT WORKS, and PHYSICS BY INQUIRY have been developed with NSF support. These programs, designed to promote both teacher education and student learning, are usually accompanied by print and on-line supplements to facilitate use and maximize effectiveness and address methodological issues as well as pedagogy and content mastery. The WGBH archives are rich with high-quality, multimedia assets, especially within the subject area of science. Significant co-funding of this project is being provided by the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the NSF Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences in recognition of the importance of a digital library collection of video-based resources for K-12 teachers, particularly in the physical sciences.
