To the Editor:
Your front-page story “Historic Election and New Tech Tools Yield Promising Vistas for Learning” (Oct. 8, 2008), about electronic resources educators have been using to support lessons about the presidential election, was valuable to teachers looking to motivate students around this historic event, as well as for alerting them to potential roadblocks, such as Web filters.
While the 12 resources listed with the article were quite good, your readers may also be interested in a free online video series called the.Vote—a feature of the.News from MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, producers of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”
Located at www.pbs.org/newshour/thenews, the.Vote includes five video features, each approximately five minutes in length, covering the conventions, the debates, the ground game, campaign strategy, and the recent economic crisis. All the stories on the.News are designed for in-school use, targeted to middle and high school students, and supported by standards-based curricula in social studies and language arts. A transcript with time codes is available for each video to help teachers with classroom instruction, and all the.Vote videos are open-captioned.
After the election, the.Vote will become the.Gov and will switch its focus to explaining for students the process of forming a new government and identifying key issues before the new administration and Congress.
Karen Jaffe
Manager
Education Projects, the.News
MacNeil/Lehrer Productions
Arlington, Va.
