Streaming video changes
August 9, 2014
Tags: Images, Instruction, Media, Movies, Music, Policy, Streaming, Video
School District 21 is constantly evaluating changes in technology and how those can be leveraged to help students and teachers do more and increase student learning. Decisions about improvements and changes include listening to a wide variety of stakeholders and looking at best practices in other leading school districts as well as the results of their procedural and instructional decisions. With the start of the 2014-2015 school year, School District 21 is again expanding the reach of streaming media to students and staff members in order to ensure that students and teachers have access to the learning resources that will be most accurate, relevant, and engaging.
YouTube
YouTube – YouTube is the most widely viewed video site on the Internet with billions of hours uploaded and watched annually. Within this huge amount of video, there is, of course, a great deal of low quality video and video that is unrelated to the School District 21 Curriculum. At the same time, this video also provides countless hours of meaningful and useful instructional material for students and teachers. To ensure access to this approach, we will be expanding YouTube access with a graduated approach to filtering based on the age of our students.
Video streaming access for staff
Staff members have full access to YouTube. Additionally, staff members have access to many/most other video sites, including Vimeo. Some important points for staff members to remember related to accessing streaming video at school:
- Staff members should only stream video at school for school purposes. Like any instructional resource, videos should be previewed for content quality and appropriateness prior to being used with students. Bandwidth is, unfortunately, a limited resources and needs to be protected for educational and organizational needs.
- When staff members share a video from the Internet with students whether on the computer directly or on the classroom projector, the following steps need to be taken: (1) The video should be shown full-screen so that videos in the sidebar or other potentially inappropriate items cannot be viewed; (2) The video should not be displayed to the student until pre-roll advertisements have been played or skipped; and, (3) When the video is completed, it should be paused before going out of full-screen mode and defaulting back to whatever else may be on the screen.
- All videos shown must comply with Copyright laws and regulations.
- Like all websites and software, video websites can only be used within the Terms of Service of those websites. For example, teachers cannot use services like Netflix or Amazon to show movies to students at school.
Video streaming access for middle school students
Middle school students will now have access to YouTube in “safe” mode. This will allow middle school students to have access to far more videos than they previously had available in YouTube-EDU.
Video streaming access for elementary school students
For the 2014-2015 school year, elementary school students will have access to YouTube-EDU. This will allow these students to have access to thousands of videos, many of which are from well known educational and mainstream media companies.
Important notes for using video streaming in the classroom
- Bandwidth & video–Students do need to be taught and regularly reminded that bandwidth is a limited resource. Teachers cannot plan on having all, or even most, students with a classroom accessing online video at the same time. As a rule of thumb, depending on the quality of the video, only 5-10 students per classroom can simultaneously access video.
- Other video sites–While YouTube.com is certainly the most well know of video sites in the world, students in School District 21 have access to videos on other sites, too. For example, students have access to BrainPop videos in English and Spanish.
- Use Chrome–For a variety of reasons ranging from how the filter works technically to how various video and audio plug-ins work, we encourage teachers and students to “live in Chrome”, including for video based websites. On Chromebooks, there is no other real alternative for accessing web-based videos, but on Mac and Windows computers, too, Google’s Chrome web browser is recommended.
Topic: Instruction, Tech Tips
Each District 21 school is named after an American author, and learning and literacy is at the center of our Professional Learning Community. The Modern Pen provides a collaborative location in which District 21 teachers can come together to learn the skills that will enable their students to learn new skills and to understand concepts at an even different level than before.
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