Education

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EDUCATOR’S CD VERSION 2 PREMIERED: The new edition of The Heinlein Society Educator’s CD was presented at Renovation, August 2011, in Teaching SF: Not Quite 1001 SF Resources for Educators, Librarians, Home Schoolers and Others. The Educator’s CD is now available as a digital download.

The Heinlein Society Educator’s Digital Download

$0.00

Offered FREE to all educators, including library and home-school educators!

In partnership with Cascadia Con, Science Fiction Museum, and Reading for the Future, the Heinlein Society produced an “Education CD” – now available as the Educator’s Digital Download – of materials for educators interested in using Science Fiction to teach their students. The materials involved cover a variety of age groups, and include a significant amount of material specific to the works of Robert A. Heinlein, not least of which is the complete text to three Heinlein shorts provided courtesy of The Heinlein Prize Trust. Leading SF educators like Julie Czernada, C. W. Sullivan III, and Robert James are represented.

This Educator’s Digital Download, Version 2.0, includes all the materials included in version 1.0, and an additional 24 items. New material includes text of short stories from David Brin, Greg Bear, and Gregory Benford (“The Killer B’s”) with lesson plans for each. Also lesson plans by Robert James, Ph.D. for the included Heinlein short stories, plus lesson plans for all the traditional Heinlein juvenile novels. Expanding our efforts beyond K-12, we’ve also included a piece on Professor Herb Gilliland’s experiences in teaching Heinlein to college students at the US Naval Academy.

The Heinlein Society Educator’s Digital Download is now offered as a downloadable zip file (CD copies no longer available). When you select and complete the purchase, you’ll be provided with a link to download the contents as a zip file. Extract the zip file contents to use. Start with the index.htm page, which will open in a browser window, and click on the content links from there.

Educator’s CD Contents List – PDF

Please choose an education type for our internal information only. Educator’s Digital Download content is the same for each selection. The Heinlein Society welcomes all types of educators.

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Description

The Heinlein Society Educator’s Digital Download v2.00 CD Technical Notes

QUICK START:

  1. Unzip the downloaded file.
  2. Open the folders to find the files.
  3. Double-click on index.htm in the root directory. It will open in a browser window.
  4. Start following links and enjoy!

Non-Windows Users: This CD-based file was created in Windows XP using Nero 6.0. We have taken pains to make it as friendly as we can for Non-Windows users, and tested it on a Macintosh of recent vintage. These elements include:

a). All content files are Adobe Acrobat .pdf files, one of the most portable formats around. Most are compatible with Acrobat 4.0 or later, tho we recommend 5.0 or greater if you have it available to you. Most personal computers have Acrobat Reader installed, but if yours does not, you can download a free copy at www.adobe.com
b). Did NOT create a directory structure that would require you to click many levels deep to find anything, should the menus fail. All content is right in the top-level root directory.
c). All file names follow the lowest-common-denominator 8.3 format for maximum cross-platform compatibility. As this unfortunately means that practically all of their names are worthless for communicating their contents, we’ve also:
d). Provided a file named CDTOC.PDF in the root directory, which is a cross reference of all file names to their actual content, by section, that matches:
e). Our CD Menus, which are in html (i.e. web pages). You are probably reading this because your CD did not autolaunch the INDEX.HTM file main menu. Find it in the root directory of the CD and launch it in the default web browser of your computer.
f). Provided this README in the hopes that at least you’ll give us credit for trying to be helpful.

And, should all that fail in helping you navigate the CD, please contact and we shall do our utmost to assist you.

LAST WORD: If you click on the links on the menu and the .pdf with the actual content does not launch, or if you click on an actual .pdf file in the CD directory and it does not launch, it probably means that you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If this is the case, you should visit www.adobe.com and download and then install the most recent (and FREE) version of Acrobat Reader for your platform (Windows, Macintosh, Linux, etc). Then try again!

Additional information

Heinlein Society Educator's CD

Public School, Private School, Home School, Library, Self-Education


In the years since it was first produced, the Heinlein Society has distributed this CD free of charge to any and every qualified educator or librarian who has requested one. Though we have never had the funds to engage in large scale advertising to educators about this offer, we have distributed several hundred of these CDs, often with positive feedback. Fulfilling these requests is an ongoing part of our furthering of the legacy of Robert A. Heinlein and the power of Science Fiction in general. Within weeks of writing this report, we provided 35 copies of the CD in support of the SF educator’s conference held in conjunction with Brigham Young University’s “Life, The Universe and Everything” symposium on speculative fiction. Individual educators contact us regularly, as well. The Educator’s CD is now the Educator’s Digital Download.

Educators CDVersion 2.0 of the Society’s Educator’s Digital Download, includes all the material of the original, and several exciting new contributions.

The famed “Killer B’s” (Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Greg Bear) who have done so much to lead efforts in SF education, have all three agreed to provide one of their stories for inclusion in the digital download. We also intend that Robert James, PhD, will provide a lesson plan for each of these stories. Brin, Bear, and Benford all have our thanks for this generous contribution.

C. W. Sullivan III has provided his “Space Opera vs The Right Stuff” about Heinlein refusing to “write down” to a juvenile audience.

C. Herbert Gilliland, professor of English at the US Naval Academy, has contributed his experiences in teaching Heinlein to college age students.

Robert James is back again, and the Lesson Plans for the “Heinlein juveniles” are now complete, and will include Lesson Plans for both Starship Troopers and Podkayne of Mars in addition to the traditional list of Heinlein works published by Scribner’s. Also included new for v2 of the Digital Download are Lesson Plans for the three short stories already on the original version – The Menace From Earth, Black Pits of Luna, and Tenderfoot in Space. Here again, The Heinlein Prize Trust played a key facilitating role in making possible the creation of these lesson plans.