Curriculum

PBS LearningMedia Hits 100,000 Digital Resources for Teachers

By Jordan Moeny — January 16, 2015 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

According to an announcement made on Thursday, PBS LearningMedia now offers more than 100,000 digital resources, including common core-aligned videos, interactive learning games, and tools for teachers.

The site is a partnership between PBS and WGBH Educational Foundation and includes tools to help teachers make storyboards, build lessons, and create quizzes using PBS’s digital content. There’s also a student view, which teachers can set up so that students can access class materials from their own devices. Many resources are also labeled with standards information so that teachers can determine how a potential lesson might line up with the common core. Though some parts of the site are available only to paid users, the majority are free.

Some resources on the site are meant to be incorporated into other lessons, such as daily news stories from PBS NewsHour. Other tools are grouped into collections, like a set of resources for teaching Shakespeare’s history plays using clips from “The Hollow Crown,” with background information included in the form of infographics and timelines.

Still others are largely self-contained: Thanks to a recent partnership, PBS offers the Crash Course videos created by YouTube stars John and Hank Green, intended—as the name suggests—as an overview of different subjects, from literature and history to chemistry, biology, and psychology. (It is worth noting, however, that these videos are also available on the Crash Course YouTube channel, which seems to be more up-to-date than the PBS site.)

Combing through all 100,000 resources can be something of a challenge—and, as noted, many of the video series are available elsewhere online—but one benefit of the PBS LearningMedia site is that it consolidates programs from many of PBS’s partner organizations and member stations, making it potentially easier to discover new programs.

Image: Author John Green discusses Romeo and Juliet in a Crash Course video. YouTube.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.