I’m getting close to my four year anniversary at KQED. In January 2019 I began my work in the KQED Education Department as the manager of online learning. Soon after that I was promoted to manage the PBS Media Literacy Educator Certification by KQED.
I’ve really enjoyed having this dual role of both leading our online learning efforts with the professional learning team and spearheading the PBS Certification program. One is more focused on building powerful learning experiences for teachers on their pathway to becoming better media literacy educators. The other is about recognizing teachers who have been successfully integrating media literacy instruction into their classrooms with an award from PBS and KQED.
We’ve been doing a lot to support these dual efforts over the past four years, iterating on previous work and piloting new initiatives like the Educators of Color Cohort and the Bay Area Media Literacy PLC. But 2022 is when I really feel like we’ve built a solid foundation to push the work to the next level by moving KQED Teach over to a more scaleable and accessible LMS and more seamlessly integrating the PBS Certification into our micro-credentials system on Digital Promise.
Now that our support systems are fully in place, the work before us is to get it in front of more teachers and librarians and edtech leads. To scale and grow the work. To deliver the impact on student’s lives that we know that the programs can reach.
I’ve been thinking today about what a “starter kit” for a group of interested teachers might look like. I envision something like an intricately designed cube:
You push a glowing button at the top and it springs open to reveal:
It’s got everything you need to get started as a media literacy educator:
- A Map to guide you
- A Toolkit of things you will need along the way
- A Comlink to connect you to other educators
- A Guide to encourage and instruct you in what you will need to know
I’m excited to start work on this kit!