PBS Learning Media (formerly PBS Teachers' Domain) is an online library of free media resources from public television, owned and operated by WGBH Educational Foundation, offering a wealth of video and lesson plan materials. Content includes video, flash interactives, images, documents, lesson plans, and student-oriented activities. Upon free registration the site can be personalized using the Favorites "My Folders," "Shared with class" and "Shared with colleagues" tools. There is a Dance topic selection that has several subdivisions and can be filtered by various criteria such as grade level. There is an African/African American Culture series offering some particularly fine titles, but currently these titles are only findable if you search "African..." Each film segment offers a background essay and other materials. Sample a list of African dance videos.
To use PBS Learning Media from the public interface, without logging in, choose the appropriate level from Grade, if desired, then choose Subject "The Arts," then "Dance." "Resource Type" can be limited to "Video." If using "Search," rather than the menus, you can select "Dance" from Subject choices on the left side, and choose among sub-topics.
Vimeo, based in New York City, was created in 2004 by a group of filmmakers. Sample video 'Channels' related to African dance.
Also available from the TCU Library's Databases page, EVIA Digital Archive comprises a repository of ethnographic video recordings that have been selected for inclusion by an editorial committee of the EVIA Digital Archive Project. The EVIA Project is a collaborative effort by multidisciplinary experts to establish this repository, plus an infrastructure of tools and systems supporting scholars in the ethnographic disciplines.
With a special focus on ethnomusicology, folklore, anthropology, and dance ethnology, the Archive is designed not only to be a long-term preservation repository for ethnographic recordings, but also an innovative type of peer-reviewed scholarly publication. In addition to providing hours of video for each collection, scholars provide description and analysis of the video documents. Expansion of the content is ongoing, with collections in various stages of completion, some not yet accessible to the public. "Browse" is very useful to get an idea of content. To search "Collections," click "more about EVIA" from the home page and then "Collections."
Note: before viewing videos, users must set up a personal account. Once logged in, videos are viewable upon acceptance of the user agreement.
