KQED Curriculum Bank

Search or browse KQED Education Network's library of lesson plans, educator guides and student activities inspired by programming from KQED television, radio and interactive.

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Trainings and Events

Find out about and sign up for trainings and events to enhance your professional practice.

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Digital Media Center

Welcome to KQED's Digital Media Center, the place to explore, create and showcase media for and by the community. KQED strives to engage you in the media production process with community and educator trainings, tools, content, and outreach. As part of our community, we hope you will help us build this innovative and creative Digital Media Center. This space will grow and change with our collective creativity.

Media Literacy

Foster independent thinking and 21st century literacy skills with KQED Media Literacy resources. The ability to think critically about the powerful images, words, sounds, and messages that saturate contemporary culture increases students' chance of success in and outside of the classroom.

KQED works closely with the national Alliance for a Media Literate America to provide essential media resources for educators across disciplines. Through tools, workshops, and in-class materials and programs, you can encourage your students to ask key questions about who creates media messages, why? and to what effect.

Digital Storytelling

Help students of all ages find, tell, create, and publish the stories of their lives with Digital Storytelling activities. Through hands-on training in multimedia production and story theory, educators and community members can guide the creation of compelling and authentic digital stories within a learning environment.

Digital stories can lead students and community members to discover first-hand how narrative education can provide knowledge and inspiration. By creating their own media projects, storytellers can also develop important critical thinking skills that help them interpret 21st century culture.

Teachers' Domain

Featuring public television content, Teachers' Domain provides multimedia classroom resources and professional development courses to K-12 educators. KQED contributes to the collection of resources within the archive with content from KQED programs that focus on local topics related to science, the environment and nature. Teachers' Domain is a searchable database of free, high-quality multimedia content available to stream, download, share and remix.

The resources found in Teachers' Domain include video and audio clips, interactive features, images, and documents prepared from the best of PBS programs and universities across the country. You will also find accompanying explanatory background articles and media-rich lesson plans - all correlated to state and national curriculum standards.

Blog: media.infusion @ PBS Teachers

Teaching World History in the Digital Age

Like so many other Americans, my early perception of world history was focused through American and European lenses. The civilizations that shaped the West were considered to be more deserving of our attention than those that had fallen under the boot heels of European imperialists in the 18th and 19th centuries. This attitude was certainly a reflection of the times. Throughout the 20th century, Western civilization dominated world affairs, caused the bloodiest conflicts in human history, and pushed forward some of the most innovative technological advancements ever seen.

But, as we know, the world is changing. Today, the ancient civilizations of India and China are experiencing resurgences in economic strength that are reminiscent of the power held in those regions long before Vasco da Gama made his way around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean. The implications of this new shift in global power, both historic and modern, change everything.