Alabama Public Television—long a favorite destination for trusted educational programs for kids—is now offering its free online multimedia educational resource, APTPLUS™, to parents! Recently enhanced with the Learn360 database, APTPLUS offers parents (and their children) a service that teachers in our state have valued for years.  Providing audio and visual explanations of hard-to-teach and difficult-to-learn concepts, APTPLUS creates an environment for learning for Pre-K students through twelfth graders. It gives users the ability to stream or download videos and still images in the areas of the Arts, Health and Guidance, Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies and World Languages along with speeches, songs and other material. And it’s available 24 hours a day.

Using this learning resource, parents and students can also access educational PBS programs that bring another dimension to learning, such as NOVA, Between the Lions and Cyberchase.  Tools for parents and teachers to create blogs, podcasts, multimedia assignments and quizzes to promote creative and critical thinking skills are also available on APTPLUS.

Alabama’s stories are told through the APT-produced content available in the APTPLUS Digital Library database including the story of the migrating Whooping Cranes that fly over Alabama and the array of talent displayed by Alabama craftsmen and artisans in the series entitled Alabama Craft: Tradition and Innovation, all on APTPLUS.

Just think of it as your own private library, filled with videos, still images and audio that’s at your disposal when you need it. Best of all, there’s no questionable content that you might find on a general Internet search engine. Remember, we’re talking APT, here. Trust is our middle name!

Registering for and using APTPLUS^™ is easy at www.aptplus.org. Parents should click on “Parent Registration” and scroll down the page to complete the online form to request a username and password, which will be e-mailed to them within three business days. For registration assistance or answers to other questions, go to www.aptplus.org and click on “contact APTPLUS.” Registration is not required for the other APTPLUS databases including the APTPLUS Digital Library and the APT Adult Education database. For registration assistance or answers to other questions, go to www.aptplus.org and click on “contact APTPLUS.”