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

Welcome Friends of NBC Learn!

“Every time you tear a leaf off of a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas and progress.”

-- Charles Kettering

Happy New Year to all of our NBC Learn subscribers! What’s your New Year’s resolution? Here at NBC Learn we are planning some exciting things for 2015. We are working on a new original collection with the National Science Foundation called “Science Behind the Brain” that will feature videos focusing on how we think, our emotions, memory and more. Our partnership with Pearson will continue with 22 new elementary science videos and over 40 upper level science videos.

NBC Learn will continue to integrate our product with educational content management systems like Moodle. We will be launching a new Implementation Toolkit in the coming months that will show you our various setup options, training tutorials, troubleshooting, best practices, and marketing tips to promote NBC Learn around any campus.

We’ll have Twitter chats and live streaming events and will continue to post relevant, educational content throughout the year in our Current Events collection. And we are even working to add Spanish-language closed captioning to new English-language videos going forward.

So here’s to a Happy New Year from all of us at NBC Learn!

Best Wishes,

The NBC Learn Team

 Featured Videos in January

Historical Birthdays in January

January is a great month to celebrate some notable births, including presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, along with important leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., General Robert E. Lee and Benjamin Franklin. This playlist pulls from our new Pearson Social Studies original collection and other archival pieces on NBC Learn, focusing on notable historical figures with January birthdays. 

K-12 | Higher Ed

The Challenger Anniversary and a New Kind of Space Race

January marks 29 years since the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, killing all seven astronauts on board. How has America’s manned space program fared since then, and what is in store for its future? Share this playlist with your students to see how NASA is entering a new era in the 21^st century, as shuttles give way to exciting new rockets like Orion, and the private sector begins to develop its own spacecraft. 

K-12 | Higher Ed

Resources for the Winter Season

Check out these videos that could make the snowy winter season a bit more informative and fun! Stuck at home on a snow day? Why not learn more about ice’s chemical makeup in the "Chemistry of Ice" from our Chemistry Now video collection.

Speaking of salt, did you know that road salt can cost over $300 million to prevent ice? Well, the town of Beloit, Wisconsin has thought of an innovative and green way to battle that hefty price tag by using beets! You can watch the story here.

Why do we use salt to melt our streets and sidewalks? The "Chemistry of Salt" answers that question and more.

NBC Learn K-12 Subscriber Spotlight: Reaching the “I get it” moment with NBC Learn

Sandra Perez is a fifth-grade teacher at Palmetto Elementary in the Miami-Dade Public School District. Perez has been a teacher for twenty years and has been using NBC Learn to teach language arts, science, and social studies. The typical hustle and bustle chatter as students enter class is silenced when Perez hits play and an NBC Learn video starts. And on days when Perez doesn’t have a video ready to roll students get anxious with anticipation. Perez says many of the videos she finds are the perfect segue from language arts to social studies or science.

After the bell ringer video Perez flips over the CueCard and uses keywords to meet the Common Core Standards that address the ability to identify the meaning of words within text. For example when she showed her students Melting Mountain Glaciers, they learned the meaning of the keyword sublimation. She says, “The students were able to understand something that they otherwise wouldn’t have learned until the fifth grade but NBC Learn made that vocabulary connection possible. 'Melting Mountain Glaciers' was so interesting it left them talking about ways they could solve global warming.”

In comparison to learning resources she’s used in the past, Perez says, “This one is quick. I can do it from home and add it to my playlist. It doesn’t require a lot of searches and it is easy for me to find a topic right away. I have already picked out a couple on friction and the solar system because I can plan ahead. Other resources I have to open the book and look at the information, but NBC Learn is easy.”

NBC Learn Higher Ed Subscriber Spotlight: Making "history come alive" with NBC Learn

We spoke to Joseph Stromberg, a history professor at San Jacinto College in Pasadena, Texas.

NBC Learn: How do you use NBC Learn videos?

Stromberg: “I use archival videos that support my narrative in the course. In face-to-face lectures, I like to use videos to personify historical figures such as Joseph McCarthy. Rather than me trying to dramatize his voice, I just show him in a clip. I also like the videos that deconstruct political cartoons like King Andrew the First and The Times. And for my distance learning students, video fills the important segments where I would normally lecture.”

NBC Learn: Why do you use NBC Learn videos?

Stromberg: “They’re short, and they’re full of really good information. As much as I don’t want to use a cliché, it makes history come alive. I also utilize NBC Learn if I need to miss a lecture because it allows me to cover an extensive amount of material. I organize my videos by class and by unit in Blackboard. I find the documentary pieces supplement my courses well. It’s easy for me, because the videos aren’t married to a particular textbook, so I can drop one in wherever I need to. I also like the transcripts, because they’re useful for distance learning and allow for ADA compliance.”

NBC Learn: How do your students respond to NBC Learn videos?

Stromberg: “They know they’re short clips, so they are committed to paying attention. They all pop up the closer the video is to a point of controversy. Every time I play the video interview with Florence Owens Thompson, the “Mona Lisa of the Dust Bowl” it really resonates with them. It is also purposeful when I am trying to drive home points, such as about the Rosenberg couple and their executions.”

This higher education playlist focuses on Stromberg’s classroom favorites.

Education Nation: Can Preserverance Be Taught? 

The ability to persevere and overcome challenges is key to success in work and personal relationships. But can you actually teach a child to develop this trait? Join Education Nation’s Twitter chat on this topic Tuesday, January 20th at 7pmET featuring Parent Toolkit experts Tom Hoerr and Sean Slade. Use the hash tag #ToolkitTalk and give your advice to parents across the county.

Join @EducationNation and Parent Toolkit Experts for January’s #ToolkitTalk Twitter Chat

Growing Gritty Kids: Can Perseverance Be Taught?

Tuesday, January 20th 7pmET

Tom Hoerr, Head of School at New City School

@TomHoerr

Sean Slade, Director, Whole Child at ASCD 

@SeanTSlade