United Streaming

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Teachers from the Trenches:
Does your school have United Streaming and if so how do you make use of it in your classroom? If not what do you use?

TECS 290: After exploring United Streaming, how do you think you might use United Streaming in your own classrooms. What did you find that would be useful. Give an example. (Assignment details are in Moodle Week 4)

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Tell me what this is: DEN at PETE-C

[Sylvia Martinez]

DEN = Discovery Education Network (Discovery owns UnitedStreaming)
http://www.discoveryeducatornetwork.com/
Hall Davidson's blog here is a great resource for multimedia using educators. And he's a great speaker if you ever have a chance to hear him. http://discoveryeducation.typepad.com/media_matters/

PETC = Pennsylvania Education Technology Conference

[Sue R.]

Thanks, Durff, they look like useful sites.
For images, I've been using the creative commons search on flikr http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

For sound, I have bookmarked but not tried yet:
The Freesound Project is a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds. Freesound focusses only on sound, not songs. This is what sets freesound apart from other splendid libraries like ccMixter. http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
ccmixter, where you can download, mashup, etc. http://www.ccmixter.org/
and Free Content, Graphics, Music etc for websites(47) at http://www.snipitron.com/iteachr/Free_Graphics_Music_etc_for_websites

[Catelyn Manly]

Simply put, this site is just amazing. It has lesson plans which can come in handy for specific subjects that might not be in a particular textbook. Also this is nice because it can be for lessons that are just for fun, like the History of Measurement.
The plethora of lesson plans also comes in handy whenever they come in every topic so I can get some physics lessons that tie into my math class.

An added freature is where it shows you the states' curriculum standards. For example, there are 114 results for 9th Grade mathematics (several of which come with videos).

Other parts of United Streaming that I liked were the assignment builder and the calendar (it gives you a list of events for "This Day in History" type of information).

In short, united streaming is pretty awesome!


Everybody always tells me I can teacher wherever I want because I'm going to teach math. I've always thought that I won't necessarily want to teach just anywhere- and I hope that the school I teach at has access to resources like this.

[Heather Burleson]

We don't have US (too pricey) but the Library of Congress has a great resource for teachers: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/ and you can find more free music at Incompetech.

Another great resource is Creative Commons . A partial list of their Content Curators can be found here.

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Creative Commons is amazing, but a little time consuming because I always find more cool stuff and get lost in searching and reading and forget my original purpose. Good thing really, but whoa does it eat up the time.

[Ryan Meng]

Thanks for the link to the Library of Congress. Looks like a great site with great information.

[Kim Pfeifer]

I used www.unitedstreaming.com in our district two years ago. Instead of streaming the Unitedstreaming video live in class, I had the option to download and save Media Player or Quicktime files. That worked much easier and I could review them at any time. I liked the fact that I could do specific searches for content and download the full video, or just the relevant segments. There were also accompanying lesson plans in PDF form, blackline masters, video content links to state standards, and enrichment links. I could also save a playlist, use a site quiz, or search for images and encyclopedia articles on the content, all from the same page. I also like the fact that I can save an embedded file.

Some of my favorites are the Standard Deviants grammar, composition, and Shakespeare series; Great Books series; and the various author biography videos I have found from the Biography Channel. I also use history segments from the History Channel or A & E on Unitedstreaming to introduce a literary era.

[Melissa Beyer]

Thanks for sharing your favorites. It is great to hear so many positive things about United Streaming

[Ginger Lewman]

I LOVE United Streaming, but my school doesn't subscribe to it. I'm trying to find something similar in Teacher Tube or You Tube, but nothing really replaces it (at this time). I wish it was free--and I think it SHOULD be free to schools! :(

[Cyndi Danner-Kuhn]

Until this semester they have had a FREE one semester subscription for students in classes like this, but they just eliminated that. It is a bummer to say the least.

[Mary Frazier]

In my old school we had United Streaming. My new district did not have it. This year we are purchasing United Streaming for our entire district. We had some networking issues that had to be resolved. United Streaming and Google Earth are two tools that I would NEVER want to teach without!!!!! When I was in the classroom, I downloaded the entire length of the video even though research shows that students learn with smaller chunks of video. So I also downloaded each video clip. I also downloaded the teaching guides and the student blackline masters. I usually created a Keynote presentation (similar to PowerPoint) and used the ideas in the teacher's guide on how to introduce the video and some of the questions to guide my presentation. Then I added each video clip to a slide. That way we could watch a little, discuss, and watch a little more. I liked putting their assignment on the end of the presentation also. I felt like the students learned more about the video by watching smaller segments. On the other hand, there were some videos they needed to see altogether after watching the separate clips, such as Jean Fritz's book, "Who's That Stepping on Plymouth Rock?"
I LOVE United Streaming. It can be taxing on a network though. We had to ask teachers to download videos 'after hours' rather than during the school day when the network was busy.