Curio·ca is CBC’s educational streaming subscription service. Available on the site are stories from the English television news broadcast, The National, and its French counterpart, Le téléjournal, as well as segments from national and local radio news and feature episodes from regular television broadcasts. Curio.ca also hosts arts and entertainment programming, including performances from the Stratford Festival, CBC/Radio-Canada drama and comedy programs, and a range of children’s programming.
UBC students, faculty & staff Library users have access to Curio.ca’s thousands of television shows, radio programs, teacher guides, and K–12 curriculum connections. Available in both English and French, they cover a wide range of topics suitable for all ages. Although UBC doesn’t currently have access to the BBC and National Geographic content, Curio.ca remains a super resource for complementing and extending lesson activities and assignments.
As teachers, we are all aware of thinkers such as John Dewey and Jean Piaget, who advocated for approaches to learning that address what today we call “real-world problems” and “experiential learning.” Even though Curio.ca, itself, is not a hands-on activity per se, it does provide a diverse selection of supplementary programming resources – including news and feature reports on current events – that help contextualise, extend, and inspire lessons and assignments that teachers and students work with each day.
Not only can Curio.ca’s resources provide alternative ways to digest and appreciate information, they can also help to motivate students and teachers to approach education in ways that more readily pertain to or resonate with the world beyond the four walls of the classroom.
The best way to learn more about Curio.ca, especially as a new user, is to jump in and search through the diverse selection of archived programming. As it happens, navigating the Curio.ca site is similar to searching the Scarfe Digital Sandbox.
- For UBC students, staff and faculty, visit curio via the Education Library for full access.
- Search by Provincial Curriculum via the Ed Library CWL login. Here you can further filter the search by subject area, language (French or English) and more.
- Searches are possible by age group, language (English or French), or curricular subject, and also by those resources most recently added.
- The site’s toolbar headings and sub-headings arrange various “collections” of programming and resources into different “categories.” These identifiers overlap, which makes for more thorough searches that turn up specific results each time. Although this means that search results eventually repeat, the Curio catalogue goes back a long way – English content dates back to the 1960s and French back to the 1940s, which is nearly back to the beginning of CBC/Radio-Canada. The overlapping search results also help to highlight interdisciplinary connections between different programs.
For a look into our country’s cultural and media history, and for some rich lesson planning ideas, check out Canada’s on-line public news resource, CBC Curio.ca!
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