Education Services Prairie Public Board Report
July, 2013
NCCST Annual General Membership And Board Meetings
On June 28, 2013, the North Central Council for School Television (NCCST) held its
annual general membership and board of director’s meetings at Prairie Public. Vice
Chair Tamara Uselman, Superintendent Bismarck Public Schools, chaired the
meeting in the absence of Chairman Bob Grosz. John Harris and Bob Dambach
reviewed Prairie Public funding and program activities including new regional
productions with applications for the education community. Education Staff
presented an overview of the NCCST/Prairie Public partnership, activities and
accomplishments performed on behalf of the Council, financial reports showing
NCCST spending of $306,098 with total Education Services spending of $416,992,
and the proposed budget based on North Dakota legislative funding of $535,000 for
the biennium including $50,000 above 2011-2013 funding to upgrade the content
management system for the NDStudies website.
Upon the recommendation of Bev Pearson and Chairman Grosz, the Board
requested Chair Uselman to appoint Bob Grosz as Chairman of the Curriculum
Committee and additional members upon his recommendations for the purpose of
either reestablishing a viable statewide committee addressing Common Core,
curriculum content assessments, and/or other curriculum specific areas of school
concern or recommending dropping the committee from the bylaws. The Board also
agreed that Uselman should establish an ad hoc technology committee to investigate
the role of localized online media services for North Dakota schools and the
necessary upgrade for the NDStudies.org website including a possible change of
name. The Board requested staff to oversee coordination of the committee
assignments as well as to prepare and present updates to the organization’s bylaws
and mission statement.
During the lunch, the Board recognized Senator Ray Holmberg, North Dakota Senate
Appropriations Chair, for his exemplary work over the years in the field education,
both as a teacher and as a public servant. He spoke in general terms and answered
questions about the 2013 legislative session as well as other legislative issues of
particular interest to school systems. The Board thanked him with cake and ice
cream for his support of organizations that extend the education systems through
partnership with other agencies and associations, the NCCST as one of them.
Superintendents Gary Wilz of Killdeer, Richard Diegel of Edgeley, and Brian
Duchscherer of Carrington were elected to the Board of Directors for three year
terms; Kelly Taylor of Mohall will complete a term, and Lynn Kovash,
Superintendent Moorhead Public Schools, will serve as the second representative
from Minnesota. (See attached Board Membership Directory). Bob Grosz had
requested to withdraw his name from consideration as Chair of the Board of
Directors upon hi appointment as the Curriculum Committee Chair. The Board
elected Tamara Uselman Chair of the Board of Directors and Diann Aberle as Vice
Chair for 2013-14 and moved to sign a two year contract with Prairie Public to
establish and administer the activities of and outcomes for the mission of the North
Central Council for School Television Board of Directors.
Ready To Learn
The goal of Ready To Learn (RTL) is to ensure that all children in the Prairie Region
have the tools necessary to grow into healthy, happy, lifetime learners. In 2012 RTL
at Prairie Public hosted five focus groups to explore the unmet needs among our
region’s most impoverished areas and found that most families have computers or
mobile devices in their homes but were lacking in knowledge of safe, educationally
valuable content for their preschool children. The timing of Prairie Public’s
participation in The PBS sponsored Community Impact Seminar in Arlington in the
fall of 2012 was fortunate. The conference provided the impact team with
information about the new PBS RTL content being rolled out, which reinforced the
mission to share the message with early childhood educators that Anytime Is
Learning Time! This information also provided Prairie Public the opportunity to
connect or re-connect with key partners such as the ND Department of Public
Instruction and its new superintendent Kirsten Baesler and Tara Bitz, assistant
director of Title I services for ND; the Minot area Preschool Special Education
Teacher Cooperative; Mahube-Otwa Community Action Partnership; West Central
Initiative; ND Head Start Collaboration Office; and other organizations with similar
reach and missions to assess needs and collectively impact early childhood literacy
and well-being.
Prairie Public recognizes that parents are a child’s first teachers. To effectively reach
parents and other primary caregivers, Prairie Public in partnership with the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting established a portable transmedia
demonstration lab for events serving families. The lab, consisting of iPads, a Kindle
Fire, laptop computers with external monitors, and an interactive whiteboard—all
loaded with RTL content, allows families to experience the value and ease of access
to these resources. Through this hands-on experience, families become familiar with
the websites featuring PBS RTL content such as PBS Kids Lab, PBS Kids, PBS Parents,
PBS Learning Media, as well as the various mobile learning applications. Prairie
Public also encourages families to bring their mobile devices to events where
education services demonstrate and even assist families with downloading RTL
mobile apps. The lab also includes a mobile hotspot to access the Internet at outdoor
events or events in rural areas where Internet connectivity is limited. Through
Prairie Public’s participation in family-centered events throughout the region, we
have been able to connect and share RTL resources with over 3,800 families and
more than 6,000 children.
In April working with Christin Mohr, the Community Impact team member who
attended the PBS Transmedia Boot Camp, Prairie Public RTL staff partnered with
the five county early childhood collaboration, Mahube-Otwa Community Action
Partnership, to sponsor an event in Mahnomen, MN, on the White Earth Indian
Reservation, where child poverty levels are among the highest in the nation. Christin
chaired a committee to plan an event in Mahnomen based on Prairie Public’s SAS
Family Literacy Event model, but placing more emphasis on the use of technologies
titling the event Wired for Learning. In addition to Christin, Prairie Public staff
attended the planning meetings both for input to event planning but also to assess
the availability of technology within the early childhood community as well as
available electronic devices needed for the Wired for Learning event.
The impact team learned that technology was limited in the Mahube-Otwa
Community Action Partnership early childhood centers, particularly those on the
White Earth Indian Reservation. Further, online accessibility for the event was
limited to Internet access and four iPads from the Early Childhood Center in
Mahnomen, necessitating Prairie Public to supplement the resources with its Mobile
Learning Lab consisting of six iPads used by both parents and children exploring the
RTL websites and mobile apps, two computers with wide screen monitors
promoting RTL resources, and an interactive whiteboard used by kids exploring
interactive learning activities.
The event focused on the safe, effective use of technology in early learning and was a
perfect venue for sharing RTL transmedia content with families of children who
statistically are likely to fall behind their more affluent peers. In addition to the
300+ members of the White Earth community exploring resources available through
the Mobile Learning Lab, families with access to mobile technology were invited to
download RTL mobile content at the event or were sent home with app vouchers
from the PBS Mobile Learning Program.
Prior to the event, Education staff provided a train-the-trainer session for event
leadership who were assigned to assist parents and kids in the RTL Mobile Learning
Lab rooms. In addition, as part of the Wired for Learning project, Prairie Public staff
will train the entire staff of the White Earth Indian Reservation Childcare/Early
Childhood Program in July when they become the recipients of funding from the
Minnesota Arts and Culture Heritage Legacy Fund to design, develop and install
twelve interactive early literacy learning environments, which will include multiple
mobile learning devices. Research by the Minnesota Museums shows that these
Smart Play Spots provide accessible, cross-disciplinary experiences that engage the
whole child and promote critical learning skills. The centers will be located on the
White Earth Indian Reservation to increase school readiness for children who face
the greatest educational disparities. The goal of the Smart Play Spots is to engage
adults in children’s early literacy learning experiences, making pre-reading skills
more understandable and accessible for a broad audience. To that end, graphic
messages throughout the environments encourage adults in specific ways they can
support children’s early literacy development. Prairie Public will both train the
teachers at the recipient childhood centers and also participate in the grand opening
with a walkabout PBS Kids character, books for children, and the Prairie Public
Digital Mobile Learning Lab.
Online Media Resources
Prairie Public continues to repurpose local productions for the web and the North
Dakota Studies website by segmenting the programs and tying the segments to
education standards. Additional episodes of Prairie Musicians and the Painting
with Paulson Paining Concepts, shorts specifically produced for school curricula
demonstrating painting techniques, have been added to the searchable database. In
addition, a concerted effort to prepare local productions for the PBS LearningMedia
digital service has added Homesteading, It’s All Earth and Sky, Lewis and Clark
Pathways, Steamboats on the Red, High Risk High, Old to New, Prairie
Churches, as well as WWII Memories to he archives of PBS LearningMedia. A
specific Homesteading clip on single women settlers on the Prairie was recently
featured as the “clip of the week” for PBS’s national newsletter and the highlighted
video on the PBS LearningMedia website.
Lesson plans from the Prairie Region Teacher Training Institute are being added to
ndstudies.org and the education section of the Prairie Public website, allowing
teachers to have access to cross curricular lesson plans integrating arts, history and
culture using a variety of technology and media in their classroom curriculum.
Prairie Region Teacher Training Institute
The Prairie Region Teacher Training Institute for 2013 was held at Concordia
College on June 25 and 26 with a final number of sixty-seven educators attended
from North Dakota and Northwest Minnesota. This year’s institute was titled
Integrating Regional Culture, History, Science, and the Arts Across the Curriculum.
Several model lessons illustrating research-based instructional strategies for using
video and other technology including web-based media in the classroom, two
general sessions presented by Dan Daly of the EERC, and a hands-on lab session
about energy, the carbon footprint, and controlling carbon dioxide featured
resources from the Plains Carbon Dioxide Reduction Partnership (PCOR) of the
Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) at the University of North Dakota
(UND).
In addition, a number of recently produced Prairie Public digital media resources
from the Minnesota Legacy project were highlighted in model lessons and general
sessions. Online resources from PBS, Prairie Public, and NDStudies.org were also
demonstrated and shared at general sessions as well in hands-on computer lab
classrooms.
Some comments from this year’s evaluation include the following:
I will definitely attend another institute.
Excellent food!!
Wonderful info!!
Well organized!!
The jump drive is a fabulous idea!
This was very well done . . . so organized, planned, and useful! Thanks!
I gained such a wealth of resources to use in the classroom to enrich my
curriculum. I had no idea there were so many great sites for teachers!
The food/snacks were so amazing – we were well taken care of 
Excellent 2 days of learning.
Very useful information in all sessions
Amazing food & great, informative speakers.
Going Forward
Dates for back-to-school workshops are quickly filling Education Staffs’ schedules.
In addition, the education department has begun interviewing applicants for two
positions in Education Services. In June, Sarah Tron left Prairie Public’s employ to
accept a training position with Allegiance Software in Fargo, and Crystal Pound has
submitted her resignation for the first of August to accept a full-ride scholarship
from the University of Iowa to obtain her law degree. Hopefully, both positions will
be filled by fall.