Thing 14: Online Video and Audio Resources

The Forest Hills District has subscribed to Discover Education alone and as part of the ISD for at least 10 years.  The quality of the videos has gotten much better since it was purchased by the Discovery Channel.  Not only have most, but not all, of the technical glitches been resolved, but the Discovery Channel has included numerous videos and other materials from their own collections.  They have also improved the teacher support for both curriculum materials and for how to save and store videos for particular courses, classes and students.  Below is screenshot of my folders that I created for the high school and middle school.  They are a bit out of date right now, but a year ago I asked our teachers for the key topics they covered in their courses and then searched the Discovery Education catalog and grouped them by core subject and specific subjects inside the folder.
I thought I was doing something that most of the staff would appreciate as a time saver.  What I found out was that most of the staff didn't use it, because most of the staff at Eastern doesn't use the site.  Other schools in the district, however, are regular and heavy users of the site. 
I have just created a new folder for my AP World History Summer Assignment and will put videos in the specific chapter folders that will provide corresponding visual information to the text materials in their book.

As I said above, most of the time there are not technical glitches anymore.  It used to be that the video and audio streaming could arrive out of sync or that the file format of the downloaded video didn't match your player or browser addon.  Today, however, my biggest irritation with the site is that even though the videos are available in QuickTime, there must be some problem with the newest version of the player and the videos.  The site keeps asking me to download version 7 of the player while I am running version 10 of the entire QuickTime app.  I am going to see if this is resolved by trying to watch the videos from home rather than school.  Theoretically, we shouldn't be having any streaming video issues through our specific Forest Hills account.  

Our district just recently opened up iTunes so I can now use iTunes U.  Much of the content is focused on higher education, but I will use some of the shorter audio and video lectures on philosophy in my History of Thought course next fall.  I have looked at the world history offerings and think that many of them are too esoteric for my kids.  But I keep looking for new materials. 

Right now, I think that the video tools are more useful to me than the audio.  In world history, they help kids visualize the concepts and lives of people more concretely than just the textbook.