This video is the result of a collaboration between Blue Ridge PBS and the Virginia Department of Education. It's designed to help educators take the next step from just using the resources of Go Open Virginia to becoming contributors of resources including videos, lesson plans, and utilization plans for ALL teachers. #GoOpenVA is a collaborative initiative that enables educational entities throughout Virginia to create, share, and access openly-licensed educational resources (OER, also known as open education resources). OER are free digital materials that can be used or modified to adjust to student needs; they are openly-licensed unhampered by many traditional copyright limitations. #GoOpenVA encourages all Virginia educators and learners to create, share, and use digital resources with the end goals of providing equitable access to great learning materials throughout the state, and supporting new approaches to learning and teaching for all Virginians.

Video training on how to find and use resources on Go Open VA. This video is also available on the Blue Ridge PBS ECHO streaming channel at https://youtu.be/61In3-szFAM.This video was created to help new and existing users understand how to get the most out of their #GoOPenVA experience. #GoOpenVA is a collaborative initiative that enables educational entities throughout Virginia to create, share, and access openly-licensed educational resources (OER, also known as open education resources).OER are free digital materials that can be used or modified to adjust to student needs; they are openly-licensed unhampered by many traditional copyright limitations. #GoOpenVA encourages all Virginia educators and learners to create, share, and use digital resources with the end goals of providing equitable access to great learning materials throughout the state, and supporting new approaches to learning and teaching for all Virginians. 

Providing electric power can take a heavy toll on the environment. In recent years, that has led to increased interest in renewable energy. It’s a big responsibility, and doing it well requires all kinds of people with different skills and talents. Let’s meet three Dominion Energy employees (Project Engineer, Groundman, and Biologist), who are doing very different jobs to bring power safely to our communities. This visual media resource is designed for grades 6-12.

In just a few short years, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, sometimes called drones) has risen dramatically. You may know someone who flies one as a hobby, and you’ve certainly seen the breathtaking bird’s-eye footage they can produce for movies and television.  Piloting one of these may be an interesting career path.

The WPSA Annual Meeting will be hed on March 28 - 30, 2013, at the Loew's Hotel, Hollywood, CA. The theme for the event is: "The Empire Strkes Back!." Democratic governance, and its triumph over fascism and state-socialism, have long been facilitated by the ability of capitalism to “reform itself” or, more precisely, to reconcile itself to the modest regulation imposed by popular rule. Regulations and reforms established more than a century ago in the Teddy Roosevelt administration, and expanded from time to time in the 40 years that followed, constrained the exploitation of workers, prevented banks from gambling with the economic system, broke up monopolies, restricted unfair labor practices, and established a social safety net, and in so doing provided fertile ground for an unprecedented rate of economic growth, improvement in human conditions, and the establishment of a large and productive middle class. The stability that followed—and the spread or co-occurrence of this approach (with variation and modifications) in the other industrialized democracies of the world—forestalled the emergence of fascism in the U.S. and simultaneously pushed back against the spread of state-socialism in Europe and beyond.Since the passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, the US has seen steady erosion in those protections. Workers in the US and Europe bear a greater and greater burden for the social goods provided by their society and receive fewer and fewer benefits while those who have benefitted most from the triumph of capitalism have begun to knock down the reforms achieved in the 20th Century. Hopes of spreading the improved human condition to the global south have foundered on a reconstructed mercantilist and neo-colonial international trade regime that has resulted in exploitation of workers in lesser-developed nations and vast environmental degradation.Is democracy up to this challenge? Can the free-market global economy again be brought into line with the goals of improving the conditions of humanity? Are our institutions, nation-states, international compacts, and ways of thinking up to this challenge, or will the latter part of the 21st Century more closely resemble the late 19th than the late 20th? While the WPSA welcomes proposals on all political and governmental questions of interest to the discipline, in 2013, we would like to pay particular attention to domestic and international inequality, its causes and its consequences, and whether democratic institutions are up to the task of addressing either.