Classroom Multimedia: WGBH Teachers’ Domain

WGBH Teachers’ Domain and Thinkronize, developer of netTrekker educational search products, have partnered to provide netTrekker subscribers with access to high quality, multimedia content for teachers and students. Teachers’ Domain is a digital library of nearly 1,000 multimedia resources for classroom use and independent study, and offers teachers media-rich tools to present science concepts to students in high-impact, engaging and interactive ways.

“Today’s classrooms demand visual materials characterized by relatively short length, limited use of lectures, interactivity, vivid graphics, and contemporary sound,” says Denise Blumenthal, Executive Director of Educational Programs at WGBH. Currently 9.3 million students in 16,000 schools across the country use netTrekker. They now have access to materials from Teachers’ Domain–NSDL’s Pathway to Multimedia Resources for the Classroom.

Teachers’ Domain classroom-ready resources include video clips, interactive activities, and images from educational public television shows such as NOVA, ZOOM, and A Science Odyssey. Curricula are aligned and referenced online to state standards in science content. Registration is required.

Realizing the Role of Digital Repositories in Educational Applications:
Supporting Content and Context

DLESE Teaching Boxes are customizable, digital replicas of the traditional collections that most educators create, store (in boxes), re-use and improve on during their years of teaching. Huda Khan and Keith Maull from DLESE: Digital Library for Earth System Education,
http://dlese.org> will review development of the Teaching Box Builder application and discuss questions raised with respect to repository integration with real-time Web 2.0 technologies as well as how this application design provides support for educators’ creation and adaptation of pedagogical content and context during the Open Repositories 2007 plenary program scheduled for January 23-26, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas.

Evaluation Practices Vary Across NSDL

In May 2006 NSDL’s Core Integration (CI) team and the Educational Impact and Evaluation Standing Committee (EIESC) conducted an online survey of the Principle Investigators of the 204 NSDL projects funded by the NSF since 2000. The two main objectives of the survey 
were:
–to document the amount and variety of evaluation within NSDL projects
–to make available exemplar evaluation instruments and report excerpts to NSDL projects

The CI/EIESC report on the results of the survey on NSDL projects’ evaluation practices has been posted to the NSDL evaluation website at: .

The survey found that NSDL projects have good evaluation intentions, and access to evaluation resources, but that many still experience difficulty in carrying out evaluation. It is difficult to identify with precision any one simple barrier to evaluation, with the open-ended responses indicating that evaluation barriers differ significantly between projects, and arise out of complex local interactions between evaluation questions, resources and expertise. The survey thus emphasizes the difficulty in identifying a ‘one-size-fits-all’ evaluation strategy for NSDL projects.

The survey also emphasized the ongoing need to develop evaluation capacity in NSDL, particularly with regard to developing centralized evaluation resources and services that are easy to find and easy to use for the wider NSDL community. This latter finding is currently 
shaping ongoing evaluation work by NSDL Core Integration and the EIESC. This work includes: the redesign of the NSDL evaluation wiki to focus on substantive evaluation reports and links to online evaluation resources; providing strategic financial support for the focused development of specific evaluation capacities which can then be made available to the wider NSDL community (including webmetrics and user panels for interviews and usability testing); building partnerships with organizations with substantial evaluation capacity, such Project Tomorrow ; supporting opportunities for regular face-to-face interaction and network-building amongst NSDL evaluators (e.g. at workshops, meetings, etc.); and initiating and supporting evaluation discussions on the EIESC mailing list.