Teachers often find themselves frustrated with trying to find high-quality resources and activities that help their students have multiple exposures to concepts and get feedback on their understanding. In addition, they sometimes express how difficult it is to find engaging activities that their 21st century learners want to do. PBS KIDS and PBS KIDS GO! provide a wide array of resources to help teachers and parents access inquiry activities and games. These allow for multiple exposures to concepts, opportunities for sense-making, and chances to address preconceptions. In isolation, Web resources and TV shows are unlikely to provide sufficient learning opportunities for most children to grasp difficult concepts, but they do provide excellent springboards for educators and parents to use in order to engage young learners in inquiry around key concepts.

You reflect upon all of the painstaking labor you have put into your project. You remember that moment, like it was frozen in time, when the kernel of an idea started to form far back in the recesses of your mind. The excitement built as you started to assemble the pieces. You were challenged to conceptualize, plan, synthesize, develop, and build your masterpiece from the ground up. As a student, you began to take ownership in your education. You became engaged in the learning process. Oh yes, there were challenges along the way. However, now that you think about it, those were the life experiences that forced you to learn the most.

Now you sit, anxiously waiting to see and hear the audience’s reaction to your work. Thousands of people have come to cheer you on and celebrate your achievements. The lights dim, and the show begins.

If someone were to ask me today “Who are you?” or “How do you define yourself?” I would have about ten different responses. Sometimes I consider the current stage of my life and other times I give more weight to the state of my career or even my mood on a particular day. When someone asks me how I define myself or what my identity is, I realize that although I define myself a particular way, it is still my outward appearance that determines how other people read me. And like most people, my understanding of my identity is contingent on how others perceive me. So while I may be a teacher or a mother, a Midwesterner or an American, I am identified more readily by physical characteristics and, in particular, my race.

We know that, on one hand, our students need the same thing from us that all kids need from their teacher — the new three R’s, rigor, relevance, and relationship, augmented by the fourth R that my friends who teach art and music remind me to include: richness. My 2nd graders, all born in either Mexico or the Marshall Islands, need a rigorous curriculum in math, science, and every other subject — even those kids who are still in the silent stage. They need a curriculum that’s relevant to their lives — and while a unit on “El Día de los Muertos” is great, sometimes a unit on Pokemon or Dragonball-Z is more relevant. They need that often-dismissed but essential relationship with a caring adult, who will respect them and listen to them. And they need richness — immersion in all the color and passion of literary and artistic works, some that reflect their culture and some that are as foreign to me as to them.

I always find it interesting when people ask me what I do for a living. My response — “I teach 8th grade American history” — is typically followed by two standard replies from strangers. Some reply that they loved their history classes in school, and others reply that they didn’t enjoy history as students but have found an interest as adults through visiting historical sites and watching historical documentaries on television. I always ask the latter group a follow up question: “Why did you not enjoy history as a student?” Their answers are unfortunately consistent, and typically make me a little sad. “The class was all about dates, facts and names with nothing more.” This is the polar opposite of what I believe makes history an amazing subject to study. When I ask the individuals who tell me they loved history class to describe their teachers, they nearly always share the same experience: “My teacher told amazing stories that brought history to life and made it personal.”

This entertaining and educational show — produced by KCET in affiliation with Wired magazine — offers teachers and students the opportunity to venture into the field with scientists who are using science and technology to influence 21st century culture and innovation. The show incorporates Wired magazine’s style and humorous, slightly irreverent tone. The quick pace and short episode segments will maintain student interest and easily blend into introductory science lessons. Wired Science will certainly reside in teachers’ video libraries for many years to come.

What was also apparent to me as an adult and educator that evening was the educational quality of was happening behind the scenes — carefully and artistically crafted stories, characters, and settings that match a child’s world view and are designed to align to a solid curriculum framework and specific learning goals. In the March issue of Media Infusion, I outlined the many literacy resources available on the PBS Teachers Web site and how these multimedia tools can play a pivotal role in motivating young learners and giving them crucial practice time to learn essential reading skills. This month, PBS is bringing a plethora of new content to kids, parents and educators!

Our country no longer occupies a role of dominance in the global economy, with little competition, as it has for the past 50 or so years. The playing field has been “flattened” due to such forces as the Internet, and any job that can be automated or outsourced will be.

We are training our students for an unknown future, having little idea of what jobs will exist when they graduate college. What we do know is that they will have to compete globally and at a higher level than the market calls for now. Any job that can be automated or outsourced will be, and what will remain are those jobs/tasks that need specialization that can’t be found elsewhere or can only be done by a “localized touch,” rather than the long arm of overseas, cheaper labor.

Welcome to the Flat World! Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I don’t know about you, but after watching this video a few times, I could almost agree with Ma and Pa’s conclusions. Where the Kettles and so many others falter in math is in viewing math as a set of facts, instead of as a way to make meaning of the world around them. Yes, there are certain mathematical facts that must be memorized, but if the facts have not been built on a foundation of trial, inquiry, and discovery, then math becomes no more than a routine set of calculations, where errors may go unrecognized. Rote memory cannot be transferred as a way of thinking that leads to active, purposeful problem solving.