Education Web Site
C-SPAN in the Classroom: American Writers Web Site
I. Planning & Strategy
C-SPAN in the Classroom designed, produced and maintained the C-SPAN in the
Classroom, American Writers web site as the key component of our outreach to educators
in support of C-SPAN’s American Writers television series. The C-SPAN in the Classroom American
Writers web site serves as an extension of both the American Writers television series and the
main American Writers web site. And it stands on its own as a resource for educators seeking
both the inspiration and the nuts and bolts information for teaching and learning about American
writers and American history through C-SPAN’s series.
The Series Through a series of LIVE programs on location and with viewer calls, C-SPAN
examined the lives of writers who “have chronicled, reflected upon or influenced the course of
our nation's history.”
 Beginning on March 19th, 2001, the 2-½ hour programs aired twice each week—Mondays at
9am LIVE, re-airing Fridays at 8pm.
 The programs, as are all C-SPAN-produced programs, are commercial-free and copyright
clear for educators.
The Target Audience This was an opportunity to bring C-SPAN’s cable’s television and internet
resources to new audiences of teachers and students at all grade levels.
 General correlations with both history and language arts curricula could quickly be discerned.
 More and more state standards require interdisciplinary connections, technology integration.
Why a Web Site? Archived C-SPAN Video As the industry’s public service, C-SPAN has made
access a priority for viewers and especially educators. Schools are obtaining the hardware and
network connections necessary to view streamed video on the internet. C-SPAN archives the
American Writers programs, in their entirety, on the web site. And the video remains available
beyond the dates of the series so educators and others can instantaneously access it again and
again, in small or large segments, at individual computer stations or projected onto a classroom
television. Our classroom web resources tap into this archived video. Through the internet,
bringing cable’s resources into the classroom would be easier, more dynamic and
more fruitful for teachers and students than ever before.
Gathering Input We sought some formal feedback as we laid down the details. In the planning
stages, we turned to two groups in particular: first, to the teams of cable affiliates and educators
who attended our February 2001 Educators’ Conference, and second to a newly formed
Curriculum Advisory Team.
 Associations Additionally, we reached out to four education associations who could help us
reach our target audience: NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies); NCTE (National
Council of Teachers of English); Cable in the Classroom and the College Board (for Advanced
Placement teachers.) The president-elect of NCSS, the Associate Executive Director of NCTE
and the Director of Curriculum at Cable in the Classroom attended our February conference.
 Curriculum Advisory Team From our conversations with each of these groups, we
determined that we should form a Curriculum Advisory Team of twelve teachers, who could
provide ongoing advice and support, generate web site content and maintain our outreach to
their affiliated groups. The team, which began its formal work in February 2001, is comprised
of four members from NCTE, four from NCSS and four from our own roster of C-SPAN in the
Classroom Champion Teachers.
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Education Web Site
C-SPAN in the Classroom: American Writers Web Site
Conclusions
Overall, we aimed to create a web site that offered valuable resources to educators and
positioned C-SPAN as “must use” resource for those familiar with cable and C-SPAN in the
Classroom while attracting new users as well. In order to do this, we set out three specific goals:
Goal #1:
Increase the membership of C-SPAN in the Classroom, and numbers of
other teachers who are using C-SPAN as a teaching resource
Goal # 2: Build traffic to our web site
Goal # 3: Raise our visibility within the education and cable-education
communities
II. Implementation Strategies
The web site would be both the message and the means for showing educators that the
American Writers series offers resources that match their content goals and objectives and is
easy and exciting to bring into the classroom. In doing so, the web site would help teachers meet
two challenges typical of those facing an educator bringing a new resource into the classroom
and one challenge specific to student needs and interests:
Strategies
a. Linking to Curriculum: Match specific writers to curriculum
b. Finding the Right Clip: The Nuts and Bolts
c. Making it Interactive: Engaging students
d. Outreach to teachers
a. Linking to Curriculum: Help teachers match specific writers to their own
curriculum. Many of the writers from the series are not well known, and may not be
emphasized in textbooks or listed in state standards. However, if teachers know for example that
Sojourner Truth illustrates the abolition and feminist movements and that James Fenimore
Cooper offers insight into the early frontier, then the possibilities for curriculum integration begin
to open up. Information from these three specific web site features leads to inspiration for
educators:
 Teacher Resources are the portal pages through which an educator can access all
of the resources related to a specific writer. Each Teacher Resource page begins with
an excerpt from the writer’s work and a hyperlink to read the whole work: the
primary source that is the starting point for the programs. Then, teaching topics in
Social Studies and Language Arts include key words that will allow teachers to plug
the writer’s life into their own curriculum topics. Terms such as SLAVERY,
REVOLUTIONARY WAR and AUTOBIOGRAPHY are in boldface for easy reading.
 Timelines for each of the historical time periods are posted, providing context for
the writer’s life and work.
 Video Lesson Plans are created after the LIVE program airs. Members of the
Curriculum Advisory Team, in a weekly conference call with education staff, identify
relevant themes, short streamed video clips and discussion questions. The themes
are universal and applicable to a subject-specific or interdisciplinary study, i.e.
“Communication,” “Race Relations,” and “Leadership.” The clips and questions are of
gradated levels, so that a middle or elementary school teacher can limit his or her
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C-SPAN in the Classroom: American Writers Web Site
use to “Level One” questions, while high school classrooms can build to “Level
Three.” The clips are archived online, so they can be viewed at any time, or reviewed
or skipped at the teacher’s discretion.
b. Finding the Right Clip: The Nuts and Bolts. Once teachers have identified specific
programs relevant to their curriculum, they must identify specific clips to use in class.
 Video Clip Lists with time codes and brief descriptions detailing the entire
program’s content are posted immediately after each program airs. The descriptions
enable teachers to correlate program segments to classroom lessons. (Clips from this
list are linked to the Video Lesson Plans—see above.) The time codes can be used to
cue up and view a specific portion of the program online or on videotape. Teachers
who don’t have enough time to view an entire 2 ½ hour program, can quickly scan a
clip list, preview a few clips and choose one for class in less than ten minutes.
Voilá: cable in the classroom.
c. Making it Interactive: Engaging Students The internet can facilitate student-directed
learning. Through scrolling and mouse clicks, students can pursue their questions, review
concepts at their own pace and make connections between ideas. The American Writers site has
five specific features designed for students—activities that can take place in school or on the
internet at home.
 Scavenger Hunt questions on each teacher resource page send students on a
focused internet research trip; Fun Facts for each writer provide fodder for games
and activities and offer anecdotes which personalize each writer for students;
Crossword Puzzles test relevant vocabulary, inspire web research and provide a
preview and review of the programs.
 Submit a Writer is an form feature which invites students, teachers and parents to
take a look at C-SPAN’s series mission and list of writers and submit their own ideas
about how other writers help to illuminate history. For approximately six weeks in
August and September, this feature included a contest. The best submission each
week earned its author a copy of C-SPAN’s series branded Merriam-Webster’s
Dictionary of American Writers.
 Study the Source features for selected writers are entirely student-directed, webbased research activities that lead students to understand the forces that shaped
Black Elk or Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, the impact of their work in their
times and today. The bold graphics and interactive nature make it a compelling and
fun starting point for original research projects that emphasize cause/effect
relationships.
d. Outreach to Teachers Promotion of the web site and its features to teachers and students
occurred in a variety of ways to audiences already familiar with C-SPAN and to new audiences.
 Membership To ensure that interested teachers received up-to-date information about
the series and available web resources, we set up a special enrollment form for C-SPAN
in the Classroom, our free membership service. All teachers enrolling through this web
page joined CSiC because of the Writers series. They would be tagged as such in our
database.
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Education Web Site
C-SPAN in the Classroom: American Writers Web Site
 Weekly E-Mail Updates Over 6,000 educators received weekly e-mail updates
regarding the web resources. This amounts to a total of 144,000 targeted messages.
Typically, the Clip Lists and Video Lesson Plans for each week’s Monday LIVE program
were completed by Tuesday; on Wednesdays the e-mail update would go out with links
to the web site resources and a reminder that Monday’s program would be re-airing that
Friday. Educators had immediate access to the program’s specific content to help them in
their decision about whether to videotape the program that week.
Other Promotional Activities To ensure that our target audience was aware of the web site,
we engaged in four primary activities:
 Two Educators’ Conferences at C-SPAN for teams of educators and cable affiliates with
special guests from education associations (February 2001; July 2001);
 Education trade ads (March 2001-August 2001);
 Classroom poster with information and features leading teachers to the web site was
distributed at trade shows, on the C-SPAN School Bus and to CSiC members (ongoing);
 On-air segments during the Washington Journal in which a C-SPAN education staffer and a
Curriculum Advisory Team member shared information about the resources. (Three
segments, approximately ten minutes each: 2/26/01, 5/26/01, 8/28/01.)
Results
The amount of satisfaction our staff has gained in producing this web site is matched by our
pleasure with the results. And the series isn’t even over yet! Results thus far can be measured
according to the goals set out at the beginning.
Goal #1:
Increase the membership of C-SPAN in the Classroom, and numbers of
other teachers who are using C-SPAN as a teaching resource
Approximately 2,000 educators, or 25 percent of our current total membership of C-SPAN in the
Classroom enrolled through the American Writers membership page. 1 out of 4 educators who
are currently enrolled in our membership service began using C-SPAN as a resource because of
the American Writers web site resources.
Goal # 2: Build traffic to our web site
Each week, C-SPAN in the Classroom’s home page was consistently in the top five, often in the
top three, of all the American Writers page views. The pages within the classroom area averaged
1,500 page views a week, for a total of 36,000 page views in the series’ first six months.
Goal # 3: Raise C-SPAN’s visibility within the education and cable communities
NCSS Endorsement In February, we took our materials to NCSS, the largest professional
organization for social studies teachers, with over 20,000 members. We applied for and received
an official endorsement from NCSS for the American Writers series classroom web site. NCSS
announced the endorsement and promoted the resources in their newsletter and web site.
Feedback Educators and cable affiliates working with educators have provided us with some of
the most satisfying feedback about the web site. One cable affiliate who attended a July 2001
American Writers conference pronounced our clips lists “ground-breaking.” Nancy Larimer, Time
Warner, Lincoln, NE, went on to say, “The more I investigate the web site, the more excited I get
about it all.” She added, “I've been promoting the series to our middle and high school media
specialists! They're very impressed with the web site and what you all are doing.” Indeed the
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C-SPAN in the Classroom: American Writers Web Site
web site has been a key component of C-SPAN’s community relations efforts in conjunction with
the series.
Educator Don Leibold, member of the Curriculum Advisory Team, said the site compliments the
textbooks and enriches classroom lessons, “Using an LCD projector, I showed the site to a group
of teachers participating in the Greater Houston Area Writing Project's summer institute. All the
teachers enjoyed learning about the site. They particularly liked how the site uses multimedia
technology to provide a historical context for notable works of literature.”
More Results
 In addition to the NCSS endorsement, our site has been highlighted at a wide variety of
education conferences (NCTE, March 2001, NCSS & NMSA, November 2001) and Cable in the
Classroom workshops and Cable in the Classroom magazine (3/2001 & 9/2001).
 Over 10,000 Classroom Posters have been distributed to educators through Cable in the
Classroom workshops, on the C-SPAN School Bus and to CSiC members.
 A significant number of CSiC members are using RealVideo in their classrooms. A recent
membership survey indicated over 60 percent of members can and do use streamed video.
We are nurturing and supporting this audience and compelling others to acquire the
technology needed to use the American Writers web site and other cable-video resources
online.
Just the Beginning
The site has also had an impact on our staff and our ongoing projects. New features for
Campaigns and Elections, the Judicial Branch and Public Speeches have been built around
archived video and video clips. The American Writers classroom web site is a powerful fusion of
cable television and internet resources, designed by and for educators. C-SPAN in the Classroom
will continue to build on and leverage this connection to enrich the value of C-SPAN’s cable
resources in teaching and learning.
For more information, contact:
Meg Steele
Education Relations Supervisor
C-SPAN Networks
400 North Capitol St., NW
Washington, DC 20001
202/626-7967 (phone)
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