Digital School Culture

An article by Andrew Trotter in the November 14, 2007 issue of Education Week poses an interesting discussion about the impact of certain technologies on student learning in a digitized world. The increased availability of digital video can be a valuable tool in creating a school culture that is more conducive to student learning, a program of instruction that better enables students to learn and a school environment that provides greater opportunities for staff professional growth. Now more than ever, video can be used to draw media-oriented students into greater involvement in their studies. Digital video, especially video that is increasingly being made available to teachers and students via the Internet, is much more suited to being divided into short clips that can be easily and effectively inserted into classroom presentations and student discussions. Educational video providers of all sorts (not for profit, for profit, and government entities) are shifting more toward online distribution of video materials in order to save money and tap into an emerging demographic of students and younger teachers who like viewing video streamed over the Internet. NBC News launched an educator-oriented archive with 2-5 minute video vignettes drawn from over 70 years of archival news coverage. These mini-video blurbs are arranged, categorized, and searchable; a topic can be searched out and studied by viewing a series of archived vignettes that are presented chronologically. About 130,000 teachers have registered for a free trial that ends in January; after the free trial ends, the archive news service will be available to subscribers for a fee of $1,999 annually for a high school and $1,499 annually for an elementary or middle school.

Discovery Communications LLC has about 4,000 full-length video titles available to subscribers (for a fee of $1,495 per K-8 school annually and $1,995 per high school or K-12 building annually), about 2,000 of which can be edited by students and teachers for class presentations. Discovery Communications has also developed and marketed an online content management tool that lets teachers search across multiple databases as well as content that is stored on designated school computers. This company has truly recognized the changing shape of educational resources by not only providing educational video content delivered via the Internet, but also has made it possible for students and teachers to search and access video material provided by other sources.

Even video providers who have not jumped on the bandwagon of streamed Internet videos have responded to the incredible volume of video material currently being made available. Library Video, which provides video in a more traditional fashion, has indexed many of its available titles and tagged them for easy searching and has marked material with electronic bookmarks that allow teachers to more easily insert short video clips into lesson plans. U.S. government agencies like NASA have made video information available for free; other entities like the National Geographic Society have done the same.

Finally, there is TeacherTube, an online community of teachers that has created, uploaded shared good video lessons, classroom content, and teacher training resources. There are some challenges: many schools facing hard budget decisions may not have the funds for subscribing to video services and schools often do not have enough bandwidth to allow enough teachers to download or stream material at the same time. Look for solutions to those problems though, because the new technology emerging with digital video has the potential to positively influence the world of education. If you would like to read more, see “Advent of Digital Video Triggers Shifts in School Market,” by Andrew Trotter in the November 14, 2007 issue of Education Week.

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