This Month's Featured Teaching and Learning Resources from NBC Learn

Welcome Friends of NBC Learn!

End-of-first-term and end-of-year greetings to you and yours, young and grewn-up alike.

In this last Newsletter of 2013:

• Teaching to Common Core State Standards? Get ideas and inspiration from model teachers by watching videos recorded at the Common Core Teacher Institute workshops this fall (see below for links to Common Core Teacher Institute CueCards)

• Count down to the Winter Olympics in Sochi with original videos in NBC Learn's 2010 "Science of the Olympic Winter Games" collection, produced with the National Science Foundation

• December "anniversary" stories and resources from the NBC News Archives, and the newest videos in our Campus Perspectives collection of videos produced by some of the nation’s best colleges and universities.
  
  
• This month’s NBC Learn Subscriber Spotlights introduce you to a high school Competitive Speech teacher in Denver, Colorado who uses NBC Learn resources to prep and prime the school debate team; and an ESOL professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has designed an entire course around NBC Learn videos to accelerate language comprehension and fluency for English Language Learners.

Have ideas for the Newsletter? Write to us at newsletter@nbclearn.com. Have you missed a newsletter? The 12 Newsletters from 2012 and the 11 from 2013 are archived for easy reference. Click on the Monthly Newsletter section of the Home page on NBC Learn K12 and NBC Learn Higher Ed.

The NBC Learn Team

Common Core Teacher Institute

It was one of the highlights of the Education Nation 2013 Summit: the first-ever Common Core Teacher Institute, designed to help teachers better understand what the Common Core State Standards mean for classroom instruction. In three workshops, held at the New York Public Library and videotaped by NBC News, model teachers demonstrated exemplary ELA, literacy, and mathematics lessons, aligned to the Common Core State Standards, for Grades K-5 and Grades 6-12. We’ve turned the nine lessons in these three workshops into individual CueCards, so you can watch each lesson, and the lively discussion and Q and A exchange with teachers that followed.

• English Language Arts & Literacy, Grade 2 — Lesson
• English Language Arts & Literacy, Grade 2 — Discussion
• Mathematics, Grade 4 — Lesson
• Mathematics, Grade 4 — Discussion
• English Language Arts & Literacy, Grade 5 — Lesson
• English Language Arts & Literacy, Grade 5 — Discussion

• 6-12 English Language Arts & Literacy — Lesson
• 6-12 English Language Arts & Literacy — Discussion
• Literacy in Science, Grades 11-12 — Lesson
• Literacy in Science, Grades 11-12 — Discussion
• Literacy in History, Grade 10 — Lesson
• Literacy in History, Grade 10 — Discussion

• Mathematics, High School — Lesson
• Mathematics, High School — Discussion
• Mathematics, Grade 8 — Lesson
• Mathematics, Grade 8 — Discussion
• Mathematics, Grade 7 — Lesson
• Mathematics, Grade 7 — Discussion

Download the accompanying Common Core Instructional Practice Guide for each lesson at www.teachingchannel.org/challenge.

Thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, lead sponsor of the Common Core Teacher Institute; to supporting sponsors, the American Federation of Teachers and The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, supporting sponsors; and to NBC Learn, the New York Public Library, and Teaching Channel, who collaborated as knowledge partners.

Featured NBC Learn Collections and CueCards in December

25 years ago — December 21, 1988

Crash of Pan Am 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland

Breaking News Report of Explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 K-12 | HigherEd

Pan Am 103 Crash Caused By Bomb in Cargo Hold, Say British Investigators K-12 | HigherEd

Pan Am 103 Bombing, Conviction, and Acquittal K-12 | HigherEd

Lockerbie Bombing Retrospective K-12 | HigherEd

Release of Pan Am 103 Bomber Sparks Controversy K-12 | HigherEd

Lockerbie Bomber Dies K-12 | HigherEd

75 years ago – December 31, 1938

Breathalyzer 1st Used By Police

Just five years to the month after the end of Prohibition in the United States (December 5, 1933) – and just in time for New Year’s Eve of 1938 — the Indiana State Police become the first law enforcement agency in the U.S. to police drunk drivers with the use of a device invented by Indiana University professor Rolla N. Harger: a “drunkometer,” the precursor to today’s breathalyzers.

See related discussion and writing prompts and research projects below.

NTSB Calls for New  Drunk Driving Definition K-12 | HigherEd

Supreme Court Debates Search Warrants for Blood Tests K-12 | HigherEd

100 years ago this month – December, 1913

Ford Motor Company Introduces 1st Moving “Assembly Line”
December 1, 1913

Henry Ford Introduces Mass Production to America K-12 | HigherEd

1st Crossword Puzzle is Published
December 21, 1913

On December 21, 1913, a “Word-Cross Puzzle," invented by British-born puzzle creator Arthur Wynne, was published in The New York World newspaper.

Crossword Puzzles Explained K-12 | HigherEd

President Woodrow Wilson Creates the Federal Reserve
December 23, 1913

Wilson’s Domestic Policy and “New Freedom” K-12 | HigherEd

Janet Yellen: Federal Reserve Can Help Everyone “Build a Better Life” K-12 | HigherEd

Writers with December Birthdays

Joan Didion December 5, 1934 Didion: “A Book of Common Prayer” K-12 | HigherEd Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn December 11, 1918 Russian Author Solzhenitsyn Dies K-12 | HigherEd Jane Austen December 16, 1775 Emma Thompson Showcases Austen’s Sense of Humor in Sense & Sensibility Screenplay K-12 | HigherEd

NBC Learn Subscriber Spotlight K-12:  NBC Learn Helps Debate Team Prepare, Persuade

At Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College in Denver, Colorado, “our debate team is our football team,” says Competitive Speech instructor Rachel Bruce, who coaches the team for tournaments at the state and national level. Tournament debate subjects are selected by the National Federation of State High Schools Associations — and each year’s topics are, well, topical. “That’s why the NBC clips are so useful,” says Bruce, who uses both archival and Current Events NBC Learn resources. “The content is always covered no matter what the topic.” One of the five official 2012-2013 debate topics was "Infrastructure" ("Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its transportation infrastructure investment in the United States.") Easy search of continually-updated Current Events videos and archival videos — including "As China Debuts High Speed Rail, Will the U.S. Ever Catch Up?" — helped Bruce's students gather key information about American roads, bridges, railroads and ports. “I can get them up to speed faster because NBC has picked the stuff that is relevant and short, so we can get to the point where we can start making arguments,” says Bruce.

Bruce has already begun constructing a playlist to help students research the national debate topic for 2013-14: “Latin America and Export Controls” (“Resolved:  The United States federal government should substantially increase its economic engagement toward Cuba, Mexico or Venezuela.”) “Many of them don’t know much about Mexican history in the 80s,” says Bruce.  “I don’t even know!  You have to have the background there to understand what’s happening now.”  [See Bruce’s “Debate 2013” playlist, below.)

Now that Bruce’s class is in a computer lab, her students can search NBC Learn themselves for archival and current events videos related to any debate topic.  “NBC Learn is multimedia, which is what these kids are,” says Bruce. “And there are so many features that make it useful for debate — the citations, the transcripts.”

The Transcript and Closed Captioning options on each NBC Learn CueCard make NBC Learn a fundamental resource for the majority of the students at MLK Early College. “Sixty percent of my students speak Spanish as their first language,” says Bruce, “so to be able to have the transcript and closed captioning up while the audio and video is playing helps their language skills.”

Current Events and archival videos that feature Hispanic Americans also help students develop a sense of identity, and their own potential, says Bruce.  “They see people that look like them and talk like them, and that they are in the news and important.”

Rachel Bruce”s "2013 Debate List"

NBC Learn Subscriber Spotlight Higher Ed: ESOL Course Built on NBC Learn Videos

This year, Luz Garcia tried something new with the 70 students in her ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) class at the University of Texas at El Paso. She designed the entire course around NBC Learn videos — stories related to headline news (“Protecting Kids from Cyber Bullies), reports on key national issues (“Experts Say Cities Have Not Prepared for Potential Disasters”), and on more campus-centered concerns (“Cut and Paste: Internet Plagiarism”).  “Providing a real-world conflict translates into meaningful learning,” says Garcia. Garcia has a “stepped” approach in using NBC Learn video resources. She plays a selected video in class, then replays it two or three times. “They are very short in length, only two to three minutes,” she says.  Without cutting too deeply into class time, “that allows you to replay the videos for the students as many times as needed.” By listening to introductions of NBC News stories by the anchor, and the narration of news stories by professional correspondents, students hear English spoken clearly, with a “neutral” accent, at a “normal” pace. In hearing “sound bites” from people interviewed in these stories, students hear a range of accents, expressions, and more informal vocabulary and syntax.

After her students have watched and listened to a video several times, Garcia gives them a video-related hand-out. “It includes 4-5 sections,” says Garcia.  “There are comprehension questions, asking students to answer general questions about the story on the basis of what they’ve heard. There are language questions, where they might have to match vocabulary words used in the story with definitions of those words, or match an idiom to its meaning.”

Then Garcia asks students to identify, discuss, and write about, rhetorical elements in the NBC Learn stories they’ve watched:  story audience, purpose, information, explicit and implicit messages.

[Below:  see Garcia’s hand-out related to NBC Learn video “Big Brother Helps Boys Become Men”]

The transcripts with each NBC Learn video are often printed out and used by students for vocabulary and grammar study.  “I can ask students to highlight or underline all the nouns in the transcript, for example,” she says.

For all English Language Learners, listening and comprehension skills improve with practice.  Watching her students watch NBC Learn videos, “I have been noticing they get engaged with these videos,” she says. “I try to really inspire my students. These (NBC Learn) videos are very useful.”

Editor’s note:  Luz Garcia is the winner of a campus-wide challenge from the Provost of the University of Texas at El Paso, for best integration of NBC Learn into a UTEP course. Well done, Professor Garcia!

“Campus Perspectives” Videos

Campus Perspectives is an inspirational, aspirational pilot program on NBC Learn: a collection of short videos, produced by a select number of American colleges and universities from across the U.S. (and reviewed by NBC Learn), that showcase what their students are studying and experiencing, and what their faculty members are researching and developing.

Note: To distinguish Campus Perspectives videos from NBC Learn videos, all Campus Perspectives videos are identified with a “graduation cap” icon , and the name of the college or university that produced the video appears at the top of every Campus Perspectives video CueCard, directly beneath the video title.

• Short documentary produced by Northeastern University on investigations by Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project into three harrowing “cold cases” from the civil rights era.
  
  

  The Trouble I’ve Seen K-12 | HigherEd



• Video produced by Northeastern University on Northeastern students' development of FilterLight, a low-cost, human-powered, UV “clean water” filtration system for use in developing countries.
  
  

  Students Take Aim at the Global Water Crisis K-12 | HigherEd



• Video produced by Tufts University on design of robotic toys, interactive games, puzzles and other “playful creations” by students at Tufts’ Center for Engineering Education and Outreach.
  
  

  Robotics Students Build Playful Creations K-12 | HigherEd

NBC Learn Awards

"If you done it, it ain’t bragging." — Walt Whitman

2013 Best Database

from Library Journal 2013 Best Databases Awards page: “NBC Learn, compiled from the network’s news archives, encompasses more than 12,000 short videos, newspaper articles, primary-source documents, and images dating back to the 1920s. The collection can be viewed online or downloaded and accessed through the online education company Blackboard. NBC Learn, first launched in 2008, also allows users to annotate and save entries to a personal playlist and share them with others. Lura Sanborn* calls NBC Learn “an awesome addition to any library whose patrons need and love digitized historical news collections.” In particular, she lauds the “full transcript [that] accompanies each newsreel,” not to mention the plus that the database is updated with historical and contemporary footage every weekday.” * Lura Sanborn is an NBC Learn subscriber from the St. Paul School in Concord, NH.