About Educational Services

PBS 45 & 49’s Department of Educational Services

Funded in large part by the state of Ohio through eTech Ohio, PBS 45 & 49’s Department of Educational Services and its staff serve students and educators in eight Ohio counties (Carroll, Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage, Stark, Summit, Trumbull and Wayne), including:

92 public school districts
111 nonpublic schools
45 community schools
5 joint vocational schools
256,700 students
21,500 educators

Educational Services provides these state-of-the-art services to educators and students:

Professional Development opportunities with an educational technology emphasis
Multimedia instructional content connected to State Content Standards
Web-based projects on a wide range of academic subjects
Distance learning projects
Award-winning local instructional television programming Instructional Television (ITV) programming

Educational services delivered in FY07
Our Department of Educational Services provided the following outreach during the 2006-07 school year:

171 technology workshops were held for 812 K-12 teachers
66 technology consultations were completed for 521 teachers
46 ITV workshops were held for 817 teachers and administrators
70 ITV consultations were completed for 88 teachers
A total of 2,238 teachers and administrators attended our workshops, totaling 6,543 hours of workshop time
Each month, 18,738 issues of our monthly TechKnowledgy Newsletter were distributed to 92 school districts, 5 joint vocational schools and 156 nonpublic schools
20,012 ITV Handbooks were distributed
509 hours of instructional television were broadcast over the year, including 45 series and nine individual programs
340 hours of block feed programming were broadcast, including 67 series and 24 individual programs

Educational Technology Training
For more than 30 years, PBS 45 & 49 has been training teachers and administrators to use the latest educational technologies in their classrooms (computers, the Internet, distance learning and more). Every year, our staff trains over 2,200 educators to use these tools and to share them with their students. Learn more about our workshops.

Instructional Television for Proficiency Test Preparation
Educators use PBS 45 & 49’s locally produced multimedia projects to help their students prepare for and pass Ohio’s proficiency tests. Overall, 5,800 teachers with 76,000 students use our ITV services regularly. Learn more about our multimedia projects.

Ready To Learn and Ohio Ready To Learn Services
PBS 45 & 49’s Ready To Learn (RTL) service is a parent/childcare provider education and outreach effort that supplements PBS children’s programs. The RTL staff delivers workshops and provides print materials to help adults extend the learning from our children’s shows into reading and hands-on activities. Since 1998, the organization’s RTL staff has presented over 1,100 free workshops, reaching 13,000 childcare providers and parents and serving more than 70,000 children. These numbers grow each month.

Ready To Learn services delivered in FY07 include the following:

80 workshops – 15 Ready To Learn Early and 65 Ready To Learn
889 childcare providers attended these two-hour sessions totaling 1,778 hours

Partners using our Lending Library kits include Akron Children’s Hospital’s Family Resource Center, Child Care Connection, Summit County Even Start, Stark County Early Childhood Resource Center, JumpStart Akron (in partnership with The University of Akron and Akron Head Start), Provider House (Trumbull/Mahoning Family Childcare Providers Association) and Portage County Even Start.

Ohio Ready To Work Service
In FY07, PBS 45 & 49 launched the local Ohio Ready To Work Service to provide support to area One-Stop Employment and Training Centers and Adult Basic and Literacy Education (ABLE) sites. These sites provide workplace and literacy resources to the area’s unemployed and underemployed. Our support includes the broadcast of GED Connection and Workplace Essential Skills Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. and the distribution of related print materials. The two television series offer viewers the opportunity to review the basics in math, science, reading, writing and social studies that they need to take and pass the GED exam.