PBS is stepping further inside the classroom with a brand-new free educational service, PBS LearningMedia. The initiative, designed to foster engagement and innovation in US classrooms, is helmed by PBS and WGBH, and their producing partners WNET and KET, along with 31 other PBS member stations.

Teachers and students now have access for their lessons and homework to more than 14,000 research-based instructional resources – including videos, interactive content, images, audio files, mobile apps, lesson plans and worksheets. The digital platforms allows teachers to personalize the site by tagging resources and sharing ideas, recommendations and comments on how they’ve used media assets in their teaching with their professional learning networks via email or social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter. PBS Learning Media will also enable class pages – or curated content lists — for student viewing, feedback and instruction on interactive white boards and school-based intranets and other networking tools.

The digital library will draw from more than 1,500 public media producers, 350 local stations, such as WGBH’s NOVA science series among many others, and a growing list of other contributors.

In addition to a rich public media library, PBS LearningMedia has content contributed from other publicly funded organizations, including the National Archives, the Library of Congress and NPR, as well as content funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the US Department of Education, to deliver thousands of resources for use in the classroom and with home-schoolers.