Tools for Schools: Streaming Helps Teachers Reach More Students

The unitedstreaming service is available on a subscription basis. According to Benavidez, at $995 per school building, per year, it is a real bargain. The company offers instruction in math, science, social studies, and language arts.

A subscription to unitedstreaming gives teachers instant access to a library of about 2,200 video programs, which are "chaptered" down into about 22,000 different video clips, explains Matt Schabes, director of information technology for unitedstreaming. Most full programs are 20-30 minutes long, and most clips are 2-5 minutes. Teachers can choose to use the whole program or just use clips from the program.

Schabes says teachers can download the whole program, preview it at their leisure, and then choose a few clips that are most relevant. Teachers can run the clips live from the unitedstreaming Web site or download them onto the school's server or locally to the hard drive on the individual classroom workstation. He says streaming use versus downloading by teachers is about 50/50.

Many teachers choose to download because they fear their Internet connection may go down in the middle of a lesson. Many teachers don't trust their school's Internet connection, says Schabes. He explains that while most U.S. schools have very robust networks within their building or campus, the weak link for most schools is their Internet connection, which is usually a single T1 line that has to be shared with everyone in the school.

At Olive Vista Middle School, however, most of the teachers (about 75 percent) risk the Internet connection to use the video clips live, according to Benavidez. He notes, however, that some connection-wary teachers have been downloading clips and burning them onto CD-R as backups—just in case. The programming is displayed via a computer connected to a video projector, though it could also be viewed on individual workstations in a computer lab environment.

Schabes says his company also gives schools the ability to store unitedstreaming's video content internally on their own in-school servers, which can then be accessed via the unitedstreaming Web interface. In this case, a teacher makes a request to the Web site, which routes the request to the school's server. This allows the video to bypass the Internet bottleneck and stream directly across the school's high-bandwidth LAN. While this may seem roundabout, it frees the school from a certain amount of network management. And most importantly, it makes things simple and direct for the teachers. The less techno-savvy ones really appreciate the service's ease of use, says Schabes.

Olive Middle School hasn't yet set up an internal central server for unitedstreaming content, but Benavidez says that plans are being made for that this fall. Having a library of content on a centralized server will give students greater flexibility regarding how and when they can access clips.

unitedstreaming also gives school administrators access to its custom-built asset management system, which includes access management features. From there they can get reports on which teachers are using the video clips and how often they are using them. Not only does this tell administrators whether or not they are getting their money's worth out of the service, it also tells them which teachers may need help, encouragement, or training in using video in the classroom. Thus it helps them to determine staff professional development needs.

unitedstreaming delivers video in Windows Media and QuickTime formats. The company has set a minimum stream rate of 256Kbps, which effectively puts the service out of the reach of anyone with a dial up Internet connection. But the company settled on this rate after much consultation with teachers across the country, Schabes says. "Their feeling was that even low broadband rates weren't good enough for presentation situations, especially if video projection was used. It just wouldn't be useful to them unless it was at least 256Kbps."