The Trend Emerges

It seems I am noticing a trend in my blog posts. My other peers are doing some wonderful work responding to their uses of digital literacy in their classroom. I unfortunately do not have the pool of wealth to draw from. So I spend my time cursing the internet for cool new technology to talk about. This week I have come across something that I found after witnessing a rather strange phenomena earlier in the week.

I came home from work to find my fiance on the bed with her lap top with headphones. She is currently a junior at Pitt studying Spanish as well as in the Pre-Physicians Assistant track. I was surprised to see her as she normally is at class during this time. I asked her what she was doing, she removed her headphones and said.

"I didn't feel well so I am live streaming my physiology lecture." Turns out her professor actually live streams all his lectures, as well as records them for further review, and makes that resources available to the students. My fiance explains she would rather be there in person but she has friends in the class that only show up on days when they are required to take tests or turn in paperwork and simply live stream or watch the recorded versions after.

This got me thinking about the trend education could be taking. Cyber schools are already on the rise and causing budget crisis for numbers of public schools across the country. Many schools as well utilize their own online form of a classroom to extend their reach into the schools. This very course were in right now is entirely contained online. Where will we be in 10 years?

To re-focus this post however, I was very intrigued about the possibility of bringing this idea of streaming instruction into the secondary level. To begin I pose a question.

Has anyone ever seen this done? Have you heard of teachers recording or streaming lessons? The red tape would likely be miles long when it comes to this, but I see many benefits. Combating Absenteeism for one. Student sick for extended periods of time? Make recordings of their lessons or live streams available to them to extend the classroom into their own home. They can comfortably attend in their PJs.

Parents could become more involved in their students learning by being able to actually see what goes on in the teachers classroom.

Something slightly more controversial, but teacher accountability could become a much bigger focus when teachers are actually on record. This may not be a door some want to open, but accountability exists in so many other realms of this world, why should the education of our children be any different?

Moving beyond just purely theorizing I  do have some new services to share with you. This one might be a little bit beyond our available pay grade, but if your school is looking into streaming this company is, from what I can tell, one of the leading providers.

http://www.vbrick.com/industries/education.asp

Vbrick is an online streaming company that provides schools, along with businesses and other clients, with support, bandwidth, technology, and guidance to take their skills into the digital world. Everything from live morning announcements to streaming classrooms for absent students.

It is a world of possibilities, and dangers, but an interesting one regardless.