Showing posts with label united streaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label united streaming. Show all posts

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Sharing Discovery Streaming Videos

Recently, a colleague of mine and myself were given the job of beginning to consolidate Discovery Streaming videos that teachers were using in their grade levels to support their IB units. There are a couple of tools in Discovery Streaming that make it very easy to keep track of your videos. (Here's their help page on this subject.)

First, once you find a video you should save it in a "My Content" folder. I have different folders within "My Content" for each of our six IB units of inquiry. This has made it very easy to find the videos that I used last year.





After the videos are in your own folder, it is very easy to then share them with others in your building or in the district. Click on the drop down menu on the right and select "share".


If you are sharing with others in your school, select which folder you would like to put it in, or select "share to new school folder". I am sharing all of my videos that I use with our unit on renewable and nonrenewable resources with my colleagues who are teaching the same unit. The next time they sign in to their account, they will see the video in the school content folder.

Want to share the video with a Global Learner in another school? Click on "Share to District" in a folder of your choosing or create a new one. There is already a video there from Idledale Mayoral Candidate, Dave "Mountain Lion" Tarwater.

This has been a great discovery (no pun intended) for us so that we can do a better job of keeping track of resources that we use to support our IB units at Alsup. There are a couple of things that are a little glitchy. For example, I will give a crisp $1 bill to anyone who can tell me how to delete a school content folder. I'm stumped...

I used two videos from Discovery Streaming recently to have students compare life of people in India living in cities to those living in the country. Cultural Comparisons planner is here.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Student work on our blog

Hello. Some of you may remember that I was working on a "pigeon letter" project at our last training. I ultimately put the still picture into Movie Maker and put the audio recording in and saved it as a movie that Blogger lets me upload. I got permission from most parents to publish work and sent the website address home to families on Monday. The students are very excited, though we have no comments yet.

Also on the blog, is the beginning of the collaborative project Sara and I are working on. We decided short video questions and answers would be an easier way to get them interacting.

Lastly, I want repeat how great United Streaming can be. Our story this week is about rock formation. I downloaded a few United Streaming videos on rocks and rock formation into Movie Maker. I picked out only the pieces that directly refer to concepts in our story. All three of our second grade teachers showed the video and gave our second graders a quick dose of background knowledge and raised their interest (with video of lava and volcanoes, you can't go wrong). It meant they had already heard "igneous rock" several times and had a visual in their head before they had to read the word.
Thanks,
Lisa
http://kelloggclass08-09.blogspot.com/

Thursday, April 23, 2009

new and improved reading centers

This is the time of year that my reading group and myself are getting a bit bored with our reading centers routine. I'd like to use this as an opportunity to spice things up a bit. Next week we are doing lesson 27 in reading. The main selection is a story about spiders. With this in mind I have downloaded some united streaming clips about spiders to download onto my set of video iPods. At one center, students will watch the clips on their iPod and then they will do a drawing of a spider and label its' different parts. I will also do a vocabulary center using the smart board and having students match vocabulary words to their definitions. I am also thinking about how to incorporate voicethread into reading centers as well. Any ideas?