Hollows to Highways

Where have the years gone?! My now 36 year old son chewed the ears off two Grovers while mesmerized (and educated) by the characters on this iconic show. Google, too, honored the series on its homepage today.

A must to watch, even if you are tone deaf like me, is the new addition to the Kentucky Muse series titled “Eighty-eight Keys, Three Hundred Years”. By all means check out the “Pianopedia” link, for a rich, but whimsical, tour of the piano’s history. Your kids will love it, too!  November air dates are listed below, but the site lists several December dates, too:

KET1 Wednesday, November 4 at 10:30 pm EST

Nonetheless, neither PBS nor KET is showing any signs of age either as we continue to produce terrific educational content. A new year of Design Squad premiered last month along with a free, updated Teacher’s Guide for middle and high school science teachers. Design Squad is a high-energy, high-drama reality show that lets kids show off their smarts as they design and build working solutions for real clients.

PBS’ National Parks series continues to generate ideas from teachers about how to use the series in the classrooom. Most recently, Discovery’s DEN teacher, Karen Blosch blogged about the series with “Eight Great Technology Activities with the National Parks” using such resources as Google Earth, Inspiration, and free web tools such as Comic Life and wikis.

Our own new resources, the Electronic Field Trip to the Belle of Louisville and Scale City, are proving to be big hits when we show them in workshops. In fact, most of my audiences had totally forgotten about all of our 25 trips and their accompanying websites.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wongjunhao/3687444918/sizes/m/

“Flood, flu, and flurries”. We always joked about the reasons for dismissing school in my district–one of those districts which often missed a monthful  each year. It seems this school is no different, with the strain and timing quite so, however.  While you weather the season, KET offers some great resources for school health information about the virus as well as some so students can keep learning while home.

• KET EncycloMedia has compiled an H1N1 component loaded with vital health information, PDF files, videos, and a streaming webcast about the virus and personal protection. Visit the homepage or follow this link.
• New instructional programming is being added each week to our recently launched KETED site. That means no more taping for you and instant on-demand access to rich instructional videos for teachers and students.
• The Electronic Field Trip to the Belle of Louisville was uploaded this week to KET EncycloMedia.
• Scale City has its own website, rife with instruction and practice about proportional math. This campy interactive will captivate your students, and the 400 pages of PDF files with guides and ancillary materials will thrill math teachers. The vidoes that accompany and enrich each stop along the road to Scale City can be used in KY studies classes, too.

Do take time to enjoy the beauty of this autumn–unusual, too, with the abundance of fruit-loop colors tinting the leaves. We can thank Mother Nature for a warm September that lead to this year’s display.

Thanks to all of you who stopped by the KSMA booth and/or attended one of our KET sessions last weekend. Always, this event has been my favorite since I have time for  informal chats with all of you at the booth and the chance to hold sessions for my favorite audiences–fellow media specialists. As the saying goes, I always feel, however,  as if I am ‘preaching to the choir’.

After closing the booth on Saturday, instead of heading to the mall–surprise!–I drove to the St. James Art Fair.  The glorious weather demanded a tour of this wonderful outdoor event. Only my second trip here, I was again overwhelmed with the scope of this fair and the wealth of talent on display. After three hours, I knew I was not going to see it all this time either. As I meandered the crowded aisles, I noticed dozens of people toting their finds in bright blue bags, and, upon inspection saw the KET logo on the side! Comrades! After asking the booth location I headed that way and saw fellow KET folks distributing bags as fast as they could to the gathered crowd. The pics relate some of the story, but those bags were a hit! Here, Tim Bischoff spots me as others distribute the goodies.

New at KET this Fall:

We are premiering two wonderful resources this fall that your teachers will love. The first is an amazing math resource called Scale City. Via a campy road trip around Kentucky, students will learn all about proportional reasoning. Share the link with all your math folks. I envision a whole cross-curricular unit based on Scale City. (www.scalecity.org)

Also, a new field trip An Electronic Field Trip to the Belle of Louisville will go live any day. It was supposed to do so yesterday but has been delayed until next week. It will be worth the wait!

During the past year we have added so many resources to our educational arsenal that we believe that for many districts a “KET Awareness” session would be worthwhile. Just contact us!