Classroom Resources

Learn why protecting your information online is crucial with this video from the NOVA Cybersecurity Lab. The Internet was originally designed to connect large computers at universities, businesses, and governments. It grew exponentially once personal computers became common in the 1980s. Connecting to the Internet leaves computers vulnerable. People can use computers to delete data, spread viruses, or even steal someone’s identity. The good news is that there are several ways to stay safe online. You can learn about protecting information by trying coding, password cracking, and spotting email scams in NOVA’s Cybersecurity Lab. This video includes a student viewing guide to promote discussion.

Cyber-bullying is where one or more person targets another through technology such as the Internet, cell phones, or other devices to threaten, harass, or embarrass another person. Cyber-bullying goes beyond just bullying because it can follow you home (e.g., through text or e-mail messages, blogs, social networking web site, etc.). You can stop cyber-bullying by not responding to any of it, saving the evidence, and reporting it.

The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. Students will interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity will help explain the impact of selective breeding on the appearance of desired traits in organisms. 

Discover the FCC's verdict on free and open Internet with this video and educational resources from PBS NewsHour from February 26, 2015.

Note: please watch the segment of the video from 1:24-1:56, which addresses net neutrality.

The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. Students will interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. This article will explain how the moon creates tides on Earth by exerting the force of gravity on Earth's oceans, even though the two celestial objects are not in contact. Students could use this informational material to construct their own argument explaining how fields exist between objects exerting forces on each other. 

The FCC's net neutrality rules were adopted to guarantee equal access to all sites on the Internet. But an appeals court ruling releases broadband providers from those guidelines, allowing them to prioritize certain traffic.

Discover how the net neutrality debate could affect consumers with this video and educational materials from PBS NewsHour from September 15, 2014. This video comes with a student viewing guide.

In this video, students will learn about the importance of web security which becomes a top priority with more information changing hands electronically.

Do a quick Google search on how social media affects your mood, and the results make it seem like all the social media platforms will plunge you into depression. Facebook shows everyone’s perfect life and exotic vacations. Expertly curated selfies abound on Instagram. But, if you look at the actual research, the results aren’t that simple. In this Above the Noise video, host Myles Bess breaks down the science and cuts through the hype about the link between depression and social media use and looks at how different social media platforms may affect your brain in different ways.

A doctored video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi got millions of views on social media. Deepfakes are becoming easier to make and spread, and Above the Noise is here to help people understand this new phenomenon and what to do about it. This video has an educator's guide and student viewing guide.

Ever have an argument with someone, and no matter how many facts you provide, you just can’t get that person to see it your way? One big reason for this is cognitive bias, which is a limitation in our thinking that can cause flaws in our judgment. Confirmation bias is a specific type of cognitive bias that motivates us to seek out the information we already believe and ignore or minimize facts that threaten what we believe. Studies show that when people are presented with facts that contradict what they believe, the parts of the brain that control reason and rationality go inactive. But, the parts of the brain that process emotion light up like the Fourth of July. Have your students watch the video and respond to the question in KQED Learn. This video has a learning activity in the Support Materials section.

As an English/digital media teacher at Henry Clay High School in Lexington, Kentucky, Jason Behler has found that his students become deeply engaged when creating their own podcasts, especially because he allows them great freedom in selecting their own genre and content. His students develop skills in collaboration and time management as well as technical and communication skills. Podcasting does not need to be confined to a class in digital media, and it does not require expensive equipment. Podcasting can be integrated into any content area to add spark to your lessons. This video has support materials that include discussion questions.

Update your students on the social media trend of raising money for ALS research with this video and educational materials.

A new smartphone app is helping citizen scientists leave their mark.

Idaho State University researchers have developed an app for community input on the Portneuf River. Reporter Kris Millgate follows one family as they use the app to help stakeholders discover the places people value along the river.

Reading and creating comic strips and comic books are engaging ways to promote literacy at any grade level and across content areas. The students in this video are members of a high school comic book club and have access to drawing tablets and Adobe Photoshop, so they can achieve sophisticated results. Even without such software, however, teachers can still integrate digital comics into a wide range of teaching situations. This video comes with several support materials that include video discussion questions and project suggestions.

There are a number of comic books, especially contemporary ones, that are not “school appropriate,” so you might want to guide students’ web research on comic books. 

Not every topic warrants a “both sides” approach. Some viewpoints are simply not backed by empirical evidence or are based on false ideas. Journalists and anyone who works with facts have to be careful not to present them as legit debates. If they do, they are creating a “false equivalence.” False equivalence: what does it mean, and why is it helping to spread misinformation online? 

Have your students watch the video and respond to the question in the support materials.

It’s no big secret that the United States has a prison problem. We lock up people at higher rates than any other nation, and there are huge racial disparities in who we lock up. According to a study from The Sentencing Project, in state prisons, African Americans are incarcerated 5 times more than whites. There are lots of reasons why we may see these racial disparities, including law enforcement practices, crime rates, and punitive sentencing policies. Keeping so many people in prison is really expensive-- it costs about $80 billion dollars a year-- and it contributes to racial inequalities in America. As a result, there’s a big push among both Democrats and Republicans to reform our prison system. And one popular strategy many people advocate for as part of this reform effort is risk assessment tools. The tools use data to predict whether a person will commit a future crime. This video explores how these tools work and some of the controversy surrounding their use. This video comes with a student viewing guide.

This lesson, to be used with Underground Railroad: The William Still Story, introduces students to the benefits of recording history. However, they also learn the dangers of sharing information publicly. Social media is explored as an effective, but a sometimes dangerous messaging tool.

While some people turn to social networks and texting as an opportunity to open up and be themselves, others are looking for targets. In this video segment from FRONTLINE: "Digital Nation," learn about Ryan Halligan, the victim of a vicious cyberbullying campaign. After Ryan committed suicide, his father, John, went on Ryan's computer to search for answers. As Ryan's friends opened up online to John, he learned about the taunting that his son endured both at school and online. This video comes with discussion questions.

In this video segment from FRONTLINE: "Digital Nation" teens talk about why they use social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. This video comes with discussion questions.

PBS News Hour's Student Reporting Labs connect students with a network of public broadcasting mentors, an innovative journalism curriculum and an online collaborative space to develop digital media, critical thinking, and communication skills while producing original news reports.

Use these journalism and news literacy curriculum resources to help students produce high-quality, relevant stories that connect your community to national and global current events. 

This interactive lesson, based on the series Breaking Views, frames the controversial issues of fake news and trust in the media with the historical context of yellow journalism and sensationalist reporting. In addition to learning more about how fake news has evolved over the years, students will learn strategies for improving their media literacy and will be able to identify both credible and non-credible news sources. After they complete the lesson students will be better prepared to critically analyze media using the Five Key Questions of media literacy, which will become a point of enduring understanding that young people need in order to be better 21st-century digital citizens in an era saturated by information.

What is “fake” news? How do we know it’s false? Use these resources from Common Sense Education to help students investigate the way information is presented so that they can analyze what they read and see on the Web.

Facial recognition is creeping more and more into our daily lives. Facebook and Google use it for auto-tagging photos. Snapchat uses it to create hilarious filters. And Apple’s new iPhone will allow you to use your face to unlock your phone. But this same technology can be used by governments and companies to learn as much as they can about you. Find out how facial recognition technology works in the newest Above the Noise video. This video comes with a student viewing guide.

Imagine a future where humans are unable to access the data, literature, art, photographs, discoveries, and vital records of previous generations. That bleak future may be on the horizon! Learn how our fragile, rapidly-obsolete systems of storing data could lead to a digital dark age. This video comes with discussion questions.

This video will walk you through some common encryption techniques such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, and RSA which are employed to keep your information safe, private, and secure.

From spam filters and self-driving cars to cutting edge medical diagnosis and real-time language translation, there has been an increasing need for our computers to learn from data and apply that knowledge to make predictions and decisions. This is the heart of machine learning which sits inside the more ambitious goal of artificial intelligence.

We’re going to talk about how computers see. We’ve long known that our digital cameras and smartphones can take incredibly detailed images, but taking pictures is not quite the same thing. For the past half-century, computer scientists have been working to help our computing devices understand the imagery they capture, leading to advancements everywhere, from tracking hands and whole bodies to biometrics to unlock our phones.

As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been a growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly complicated. Vocabularies are diverse, sentence structures can often dictate the meaning of certain words, and computers also have to deal with accents, mispronunciations, and many common linguistic faux pas.

Robots are often thought of as a technology of the future, but they're already here by the millions in the workplace, our homes, and pretty soon on the roads. We'll discuss the origins of robotics to its proliferation and even look at some common control designs that were implemented to make them more useful in the workplace.

This video will discuss some psychological considerations in building computers, like how to make them easier for humans to use, the uncanny valley problem when humanoid robots get more and more humanlike, and strategies to make our devices work better with us by incorporating our emotions and even altering our gaze.

This video will go a little meta and talk about how computer science can support learning with educational technology. We here at Crash Course are big fans of interactive in-class learning and hands-on experiences, but we also believe in the additive power of educational technology inside and outside the classroom from the Internet itself.

In the past 70 years, electronic computing has fundamentally changed how we live our lives, and we believe it’s just getting started. From ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, and self-driving cars to brain-computer interfaces, wearable computers, and maybe even the singularity there is so much amazing potential on the horizon.

Welcome to Crash Course Computer Science! This video will take a look at computing’s origins because even though our digital computers are relatively new, the need for computation is not.

We ended the last episode at the start of the 20th century with special-purpose computing devices such as Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines. But the scale of human civilization continued to grow, as did the demand for more sophisticated and powerful devices. Soon, these cabinet-sized electro-mechanical computers would grow into room-sized behemoths that were prone to errors. But it was these computers that would help usher in a new era of computation - electronic computing.