At Pickett's Mill Elementary, we have a closed circut cable system. It is through the cable provider and we no longer use the satelites at any of our schools. We use the system for our daily news (PBS--Pirate Broadcasting System). The fifth grade students run the news and both cameras. There is a board that the "producer" stands at to switch sounds and cameras as needed. There is a teleprompter in the room for the "anchors" and an area for the weather. The head in system also has 2 dvd players and can be played on two different closed circut channels. The county has the stations set and those channels can be watched in any classroom. The teachers have no control over what cable channels are picked for the schools. Sometimes a bookfair video or video created by a grade level will be broadcast on one of the channels throughout the day. Another channel is hooked up to the computer and has a scrolling bulliten board for the school events and information. We will soon be changing to a system that gives the teacher the choice of cable channels through the classroom computer. I have only heard rumbilings of this so I wasn't able to get many details on which system or how it was exactly going to work.
GPB resources and videostreaming is used frequently at my school. Each teacher set up an account and we were trained our first year at the school. We have bought very few videos because of this resource. Administration feels that we should be using video clips and not full length videos in lessons so this is a great resource. Also, we believe that we pay for it out of county media funds so we should be using it. Just this week I am using GPB for a grammar lesson. It is on adjectives. The video clips even have "quizzes" that the students can take. It gets them involved and excited about learning. It is easy to download. I do suggest downloading because in my case I always want something when the internet is down. So, I try to prepare lessons ahead of time and download the video for the lesson and then delete it. It makes for easy transitions and there is no wait time for the streaming or buffering. I love using this resource and use it at least once a week in my third grade classroom. The one thing I love is Magic School Bus! The kids love to watch that for indoor recess and they are learning at the same time!
GPB resources and videostreaming are excellent resources for schools to use. From what I am seeing so far they seem to be under utilized in schools. It sounds like your school does a great job using these resources. It is awesome that you are trained on how to use this during your first year of teaching. I would imagine that this is what contributes to teachers using these resources more.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of downloading the video to use with your lesson so that you do not have to waste unnecessary time and you also do not have to worry about the internet not being available when you show your video. Great tip! Thanks for sharing.
Wow, it sounds like your school does a great job integrating this technology into the classroom. We do not have a school news program, but we do use United Streaming to get videos for the classroom. I like being able to use the computer to show the videos because I am in a "cottage" of 10 classrooms and we don't have our own TVs out there. I agree with downloading the videos before because I always run into a buffering issue and the video pauses for 10 seconds every minute or so. As you can imagine, you lose the attention of a 7-year-old in that time.
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