Darlington teacher heads to Washington for C-SPAN’s Educators’ Conference
By Samantha Lyles, Staff Writer, slyles@newsandpress.net
Trinity-Byrnes Collegiate School social studies teacher Tim Streit will attend one of two C-SPAN Educators’ Conferences designed to help educators fully exploit C-SPAN’s informational resources.
Streit is one of 29 educators from across the nation selected to attend the high school conference July 25-26.
“C-SPAN has selected us to go to D.C. and learn how to implement a variety of educational tools they’ve put together for our classrooms,” says Streit. “They have a pretty extensive network of different learning tools, videos and text resources in a big database on their website, and they’re going to show us how to most effectively use those things.”
At the conference, teachers will explore C-SPAN Classroom’s free resources, get insight from guest speakers and learn how to search, clip and share videos from over 250,000 hours in C-SPAN’s video library.
“I’m hoping to use (these resources) to engage my students in current events. C-SPAN is one of the only organizations that is present at every major political event you could think of, and going into a presidential election next year it will be very important to have access to those kinds of recordings,” Streit says.
He adds that C-SPAN’s database of older political material — including commercials, interviews, speeches and interactions with foreign leaders — gives students valuable context and provides great discussion material for his Comparative Politics classes.
C-SPAN Classroom offers deep wells of content on public affairs, government, history and literature.
The site features a variety of tools for teachers, like Current Events videos, Lesson Plans and Bell Ringers, On This Day in History events, Constitution Clips and Classroom Deliberations. At the conference, Streit and other teachers will learn how to use these resources to better engage students.
Streit notes that as the role of technology grows in the classroom, events like the C-SPAN conference are key to helping teachers and students get the most out of their time online. Also, with increased requirements for tech proficiency in the workplace, giving students broader experience with navigating big data and collaborating on projects could yield career benefits down the road.
“At Trinity-Byrnes, we use technology in the classroom every day. We have a one-to-one policy when it comes to iPads or Internet devices, so every kid has a device. When they come to class, if they have a presentation, they can just throw it up on our Smartboard or our Apple TV,” Streit says. “They interact with technology in our computer lab and submit all their homework through Google Classroom … pretty much, without technology, we wouldn’t be able to do all we need to do.”
Aside from the obvious benefit of access to information, Streit says giving students a grounding in the subject matter – government, politics, world affairs – provided by C-SPAN and taught by social studies, history and government teachers is crucial to helping them understand the world we live in.
“A government class is partially informative but also encouraging. It’s built to show them the kind of values that our society has deemed important, whether it be tolerance and civil liberties, or compromise, or the value of voting, or a willingness to sacrifice for things you believe in,” says Streit.
He also observes that with the proliferation of biased journalism, paid commercial content, and partisan editorials passed off as news, students must become savvy at separating signal from noise.
“My social studies department works cross-curricularly with our English department to engage on media literacy, so when the kids go to Facebook and see whatever random thing is posted there or on Twitter, they can judge what is from a reputable source and what is just some rando spouting off their own opinion,” says Streit.
According to a press release, the C-SPAN Educator’s Conference participants were selected by a panel of C-SPAN representatives and evaluated based on their commitment to learning new educational resources, applying them in the classroom environment and sharing their professional development experiences in their academic communities. C-SPAN provides roundtrip airfare, hotel accommodations and meals for the two days.
“This conference provides a hands-on experience for teachers to discover new tools to take back to the classroom, and we’re excited to see the innovative ways teachers will implement these resources,” said Craig McAndrew, C-SPAN Manager of Education Relations. “For over 20 years, C-SPAN has hosted Educators’ Conferences, and we look forward to meeting and working with this year’s participants.”
Conference attendees will hear from Founder and Executive Chairman Brian Lamb about the public affairs network. In addition, Steve Scully, C-SPAN Political Editor, will be the guest speaker at the conference dinner.
C-SPAN, the public affairs network providing Americans with unfiltered access to congressional proceedings, was created in 1979 as a public service by the cable television industry and is now wholly funded through fees paid by cable and satellite companies that provide C-SPAN programming.