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EducationTexas schools and universities have a long history of partnering with public television to provide high-quality educational programming to Texans. In fact, KUHT in Houston was the first noncommercial educational television station in the nation. In 1982 the Texas Public Broadcasting Association (TPBA) was formed to foster collaboration and increase access to education for the benefit of all Texans.
Community PartnershipsSince that time Texas stations have participated in public-private partnerships to offer preschool outreach services, K-12 educational services and distance learning programs. The federal mandate for all broadcasters to convert to digital television brought a new opportunity to partner on a wider level with schools, libraries and hospitals. The state’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund (TIF) invested $20 million to assist public television stations in the capital outlay and development of digital broadcasting technology.
Raising Readers
Texas PBS Stations are working with the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the Raising Texas initiative to develop new ways to prepare young children for school. This initiative uses the latest research to build reading skills and is part of a national literacy campaign focused on building reading skills at home, at school, in child care and in the community.
Funded by a Ready To Learn grant from the United States Department of Education, the Raising Readers initiative is developing engaging PBS KIDS' television programs, exciting activities, playful Websites and easy-to-use learning resources for kids, parents, caregivers and teachers—all with the goal of helping children ages 2 to 8 get ready to read.
On-Demand Video for ClassroomsIn 2004 Texas PBS Stations partnered with TEA to experiment with this technology. TPBA, TEA and Texas A&M University developed a pilot project to study cost-effective solutions for providing multi-media and other large volumes of data to rural and underserved school districts. This first step towards a media-on-demand system helped the stations establish a statewide educational service.
In addition to a national video library correlated to state standards, the project successfully delivered more than 67 titles of Texas-specific content to 158 schools. The Texas Digital Datacasting Pilot Project successfully delivered multi-media content to schools particularly in rural parts of the state and with limited access to broadband services. |
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