Education

When fifth grader Katharine Ahrens describes KCPT's ChalkWaves program, words like interesting, excited and really cool crop up. A student at Acadamie Lafayette, a Kansas City charter school, Ahrens is firmly a fan of KCPT's engaging new "video burst" concept dubbed ChalkWaves.

"It's so interesting," she said. "ChalkWaves lessons have lots of information and are really cool. It's an adventure to watch something that shows you what could actually happen."

ChalkWaves is a digital archive of 7,729 video clips specially produced for the classroom. The effect is much like an audio/video encyclopedia of the world right in the classroom. It provides electronic content and related teacher development services that enable participating schools to increase student performance while reducing costs. ChalkWaves is part of a partnership between 240 school districts in Missouri, Kansas and Illinois with public broadcasters and educational service centers.

"We offer services that assist teachers in meeting learning objectives and engaging students in meaningful learning experiences using digital video," said Michael Zeller, director of education at KCPT. "Learning specialists say that young learners process pictures 66,000 times faster than the printed word. ChalkWaves transports learners to places otherwise unreachable in the classroom using visuals that the teacher controls. This is a major achievement in reaching today's media-savvy generation."

"Learning specialists say that young learners process pictures 66,000 times faster than the printed word. ChalkWaves transports learners to places otherwise unreachable in the classroom using visuals that the teacher controls.

"My kids are definitely learning more because ChalkWaves digital video is so instant," said Blue Valley Elementary teacher Kari Stubbs. "This creates an active, 'lean-in' experience that they can also control."

Zeller said that ChalkWaves also speaks to multiple learning styles, improves comprehension, increases learning and retention and can be learner-directed as students navigate the collection via computer according to their individual learning needs.

"Students learn in a variety of ways and ChalkWaves enables them to immediately fulfill their needs for resources, reinforcement and remediation," Zeller added.

Science learning, in particular, can be made more meaningful and accessible through the embedding of brief live-action video clips among the hands-on and group activities found in a successful learning experience. Live-action video elements convey information in ways unmatched by text or words alone.

For example, the study of surface tension---the force behind water's peculiar ability to hold itself together when filled above the rim of a drinking glass---can be enormously enhanced by just a few seconds of video showing astronauts marveling at floating globs of water in outer space, followed by a zoom-in for an animated view of the molecular structures binding the liquid water together.

Quality, readily accessible content is the hallmark of ChalkWaves. Local KCPT staff and school media specialists annually select the 7,729-clip collection (1,240 titles) from an array of educational video publishers.

"It's the 'greatest hits' of the K-12 digital-video world," Zeller said.

One standout feature of ChalkWaves is that its content is self-contained and doesn't tie up other valuable school computing resources.

"It's like tap water, just turn it on, turn it off," said Shawnee Mission Media Specialist Karen Romang. "No need to download in advance or store to individual computers. And best of all, no internet congestion or expense, which makes our tech guys really happy!"

The program is already in place in 240 school districts in the three states, but a partnership between the Kauffman Foundation and KCPT will transform both the quality and scope of science teaching and learning in 50 schools with low-income children by equipping teachers with ChalkWaves.

The Kauffman Foundation awarded KCPT a $352,000 grant so that 50 distressed schools can participate in ChalkWaves. The schools will be invited to each send a team consisting of an administrator and two science teachers to compete at a two-day training event at the Foundation in February.

The teams will take back to their schools media-rich lesson plans targeting their unique teaching challenges; a two-year subscription to the ChalkWaves library along with the device in which it's stored; and at least one highly prized piece of equipment necessary for high-impact visual learning: digital projectors capable of vividly displaying text, the world wide web and ChalkWaves video.

KCPT will organize and deliver all aspects of the training including facilitation, which will be conducted by fifteen master teacher mentors, each a veteran of the station's ongoing teacher training program based upon media integration methodologies developed by WNET--New York and KCPT for the National Teacher Training Institute, or NTTI.

Participants will bring to the event standardized test results (state or district) pinpointing ten specific science objectives that have been consistently unmet. Over the course of two days, teams will be introduced to a variety of visual media resources including the ChalkWaves library. They will also learn the best techniques for using ChalkWaves in the classroom.

After the two-day training, mentors will then work directly with participants in their school buildings to identify and resolve obstacles to change, assist in the writing of lesson-plans to be added to the online archive and co-present the new visual learning approaches and their personal experiences to the larger staff at the school for widespread adoption across the curriculum.

KCPT will provide each school a 300 GB hard drive storage device containing the entire 15,000 video-clip ChalkWaves collection (of which approximately 35 percent are focused on science) and PDF teacher guides. The station will also provide technical assistance to ensure the system is fully operational on each school's local network when participants return for the fall teaching semester.

Besides being a leader in technology for the classroom, ChalkWaves is very popular with educators for its quality.

"As with textbooks, I have to guarantee quality," said Dr. Dan Colgan, St. Joseph Public Schools Superintendent. "I can trust my local PBS station to work with our media specialists through the ChalkWaves ITV Council to select the highest quality programs available."

Besides the quality content and the success of ChalkWaves as a teaching tool, students like Katharine Ahrens embrace it for other reasons.

"I like ChalkWaves because we learn exciting stuff about the Aztecs, Mayans and atoms and it's fun," she said. "Instead of reading it out of a book you can see it. It's more fun for kids. ChalkWaves is really cool."