Ohio Hub leverages Public TV to Communicate Science
This blog posting was contributed by our Ohio Regional Hub leader. I thought others might enjoy reading it!
Dear COPUS Hub Colleagues:
This morning during the call I was asked about the role of our Public TV/Radio stations. We work in Cleveland with ideastream (a partnership of Cleveland’s WVIZ-TV PBS and WCPN-Radio NPR), although our outreach work is statewide. They serve as our non-profit fiscal agent. Aside from being the largest PBS/NPR outlet in Ohio, they also operate the Ohio Channel in Columbus, which covers state level government. Through their work, we are part of a network of all the PBS/NPR outlets in Ohio. For an indirect fee on our income, they provide us with office space, phones, computers, financial services, etc. We, in turn, look for opportunities to involve them in science & math outreach. Below is just one example of an activity done jointly between WVIZ TV, Great Lakes Science Center, SMART Consortium (one of OMSC’s teacher quality member organizations), and a panel of National Board Certified middle school science teachers. We received production funding from eTech Ohio - part of the state’s teacher quality initiatives for digital learning. Now, very little of this is new from a content perspective, but our design concept was to give teachers background knowledge, pedagogy, and additional resources so that a more inquiry-based approach could be taken to the study of the concepts in the videos. The first 20 episodes are here We are in the process of doing 8 more related to thermodynamics, convection, conduction, more air pressure, etc. to get at interactions of the hydrosphere and atmosphere.
The other current project is the production of the twenty-two 45-second STEM Ed viral media public awareness spots I mentioned this morning. Those start to roll out in April. They will show students and families some intriguing topics from science, engineering, mathematics, and technology that we hope will inspire students to seek careers in these areas. Resources for parents - including career preparation and college scholarship/apprenticeship opportunities will also be made available through a Web site dedicated specifically to this project. This is just in DRAFT, but we will probably be using something like this for outreach and conversation:
www.conduitohio.ning.comAlso look at our “Ideas” special news report from April 2008 http://www.wviz.org/index.php/WVIZ/ideas/ on Ohio’s schools and the crisis in STEM education. The relationship with media is complex, but workable. If it is objective and informs the community, then we can sometimes arrange to get news coverage. Such efforts are held to strict practices of news reporting. We can also purchase air time or underwriting and make more subjective advocacy announcements on a fee-based arrangement.
Feel free to write or call to discuss any of this in more depth.
George Viebranz, Executive Director
Ohio Mathematics and Science Coalition