The Global Connections Web site integrates and contextualizes the rich body of public broadcasting resources to provide a global and historical perspective that will help teachers, students, and the general public explore and understand seminal events of national and international significance.

Middle East focus

For this initial phase, Global Connections focuses on the Middle East. Visitors to the site can explore the past 100 years of history here as well as the relationship between the region and the West. In the future, the site will grow to incorporate other geographic regions around the world.

The area commonly referred to as the Middle East is multiethnic and multicultural. The resources gathered here, and the topics explored, reflect this diversity. As the largest group in the region, Muslims figure prominently there, as well as on this site.

Ways to use this site

There are several points of entry into the site's content. A timeline offers a compendium of events across a range of themes over the past 100 years. Alternately, users may explore the timeline through the lens of a single theme, such as economics or religion. To help put it all into context, the site offers a series of "connecting questions" which pose higher-level inquiries that cut across themes and time.

For educators

For educators, each of the six connecting questions is accompanied by three activities. These are written for high school classrooms, but may be scaled up or down. Additionally, a section on multimedia will help both teachers new to multimedia and veteran users make more effective educational use of video and the Web.

Responding to 9/11

The Communities Respond section features case studies from schools, public television stations, and other local groups around the United States that illustrate how they have incorporated global events into local actions, programming, and curricula, particularly in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.