One of my roles on the SciLinks team is to find resources for a specific topic. Using several search engines, I browse through the lists and select sites for a more intense review and approval process. You as a SciLinks user then have a list of websites for a given topic that have been reviewed and whose content has been correlated with the National Science Education Standards.
Occasionally, I come across a resource for a specific topic that is part of a larger, more general collection. I’d like to call your attention to Teachers’ Domain, sponsored by the WGBH Educational Foundation. This is an indexed and annotated collection of multimedia resources from public television. I’ve used the URL to the main site (http://www.teachersdomain.org) in the link above so that you can share it with your colleagues in other content areas.
There are so many wonderful science resources on public television, but getting these resources into the classroom used to be a challenge. We could order a tape of a program from a regional library and hope that it would be delivered in time to use in our lesson, we could purchase a copy if our budgets permitted, or we could tape off the air, with appropriate permissions, assuming that the programming matched our lesson. In the analog tape media, it was hard to pinpoint a brief clip or a series of clips.
But this digital collection solves the problem. From this site you can access hundreds of individual multimedia resources (video clips, photographs, audio files, animations, PDF documents) anytime from any computer with an Internet connection. Most of these resources have a generous use policy. All of them can be used online, most can be downloaded, and many can be shared or added to your own presentations. The site also has a set of lesson plans that integrate these resources. These lessons are very good, and many of them have been added to SciLinks. There are links to professional development opportunities offered by PBS, too.
The site can be used with or without a registration/login (which is free). I did go through the registration process, which requires that you list your school or affiliation. If your school/district is not listed, you can add it. The advantage of registering is that when you find a resource, it is correlated to your state’s academic standards. Registration also gives you access to online folders to “save” resources for future projects or lesson.
With the websites in SciLinks and the multimedia resources of Teachers’ Domain, you’ll all set to help students explore topics visually and to take students beyond the classroom walls.