PBS Programs with an Ohio twist

CET brings great PBS and PBS Kids programming into classrooms and living rooms across Greater Cincinnati every day. Many educators have discovered these high-quality programs and the accompanying educational materials as valuable instructional resources in the classroom.

However, teachers know that pressure to focus on Ohio Academic Content Standards and raise test scores continues to take unparalleled emphasis in each classroom. This emphasis controls virtually every decision made by a teacher to use or not to use available materials in his or her classroom. When a single program or series has been isolated with localized content, the resources have experienced higher than normal usage levels by teachers here in Southwest Ohio. The localized content includes correlations to state standards in that specific content area, multimedia materials and lesson plans written by in-service teachers or area content experts.

CET is launching a year-long intensive campaign to reintroduce and foster usage of the many and varied PBS and CET instructional resources, especially those tied to the prime time and kids’ programs. CET will identify new programming available via broadcast and streaming for classroom viewing. Learning Services will collaborate with creative and technology-savvy area teachers to create and share their lesson plans and materials with other teachers. All materials will be made available via CETconnect.org. CET will also solicit assistance from school technology coordinators to make sure the technology used in this project is appropriate and accessible by targeted teachers in the schools and at home. Opportunity will be given to teachers to participate in a “wiki-based” lesson plan development project to ascertain if collaborative efforts online will result in high quality materials and the sharing of creativity and innovation across school districts.

To help us jump start this effort, we need your help. We want to determine which PBS or CET resources you currently use. Please take our brief online survey and help us in the future to better meet your needs. If you would like to submit a lesson plan based on a PBS program, or if you are interested in learning more about the project, please contact us.

This project is made possible by generous support from The Wohlgemuth Herschede Foundation.