August 21, 2008
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The Shape of Life: The Story of the Animal Kingdom
High School Biology and Life Science
2003 Acquisition from Sea Studios Foundation, Monterey, California.
Derived from The Shape of Life, the high definition documentary that appeared on PBS in Spring 2002. Explores in intimate detail the evolution of the eight major phyla representing 98% of all animal life. With stunning animation and breathtaking natural history footage, the series reveals how a few simple body plans blossomed into Earth's spectacular animal diversity.
AIT’s instructional design team took this series of eight 60-minute programs and reorganized it into a special classroom edition of nine 30-minute programs with a full teaching guide.
- Working from video masters, we cut and re-edited the programs to provide the most educational footage from the originals into classroom-length portions.
- Added new narration when needed
- Added titles (lower thirds) to highlight specific educational points
- Divided each program into core educational segments, and added onscreen questions for educators to use as pause points for discussion
- Created a ninth program on the Cambrian Explosion, repurposing footage taken from all eight of the original programs
- Close-captioned the final product
- Digitized the final output, providing additional formats for customers
As the PBS teaching guide was deemed inappropriate for our target audience, we created a full, 60-page teaching guide, providing instructional focus for middle and high school biology teachers. The guide included the following for each of the nine programs:- Correlations to national standards recommended by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
- Reading Lists
- Background Information for teachers
- Vocabulary Lists
- Previewing Activities
- Viewing Suggestions, including discussion guides to accompany the onscreen pause point questions
- Post-viewing activities that cover the full spectrum of Bloom’s Taxonomy of thinking skills
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