Most-loved PBS Wisconsin Education media of 2022

December 28, 2022 Marci Glaus Leave a Comment

Bring in the new year with some of the most-loved educational media from PBS Wisconsin Education! These resources are created with and for educators, but people of all ages are known to enjoy and learn from them.

Start with the award-winning Wisconsin Biographies collection. For nearly 10 years, PBS Wisconsin Education has produced this collection of free, educational, online media resources using the stories of notable people in Wisconsin history. The 2022 Wisconsin Biographies learner favorite is Chief Oshkosh: Leader in Troubled Times. Learn how Chief Oshkosh negotiated treaties that allowed the Menominee to stay in their homeland and promoted his people’s traditional forest management practices, now known as sustainable forestry.

The Wisconsin First Nations website continues to be an educational favorite as well. PBS Wisconsin Education created the site in partnership with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education as an important space for educators to access authentic educational videos, lesson plans and learning tools.

The Ways is one resource on the website that explores connections between traditional ways and those of today through language and culture stories from Native communities around the central Great Lakes. It was close, but the Waadookodaading Ojibwe Immersion School video from The Ways emerged as the most popular in 2022. Waadookodading, “a place where people help each other,” is an Ojibwe immersion school that integrates the tradition of sugaring into the curriculum. Leaders from the school explain the importance of learning and preserving the language.

This year was another big year for Meet the Lab, a digital collection of middle school learning resources developed in collaboration with research labs on the UW-Madison campus. Two new labs joined the lineup, showcasing the many topics and identities within scientific communities. Visual Communicators: Superpowered by Color explores how to use visual features to make sense of something through the Schloss Visual Reasoning Lab. They research human reactions to messages made with visual elements like color, shape and line. Learn why their research matters in a real-life mapmaking example.

Bio Builders: Superpowered by Stem Cells explores how scientists from the Thomson Lab use stem cells to repair damaged tissue and improve human health treatments. Meet the scientists who study and work with stem cells, and learn why this research matters with a real-life story from a scientist who lost her twin sister at a young age from a nervous system disorder.