United Streaming

November 11, 2007 at 11:23 pm · Filed under United Streaming and tagged: United Streaming

United Streaming is an on-line video site that should supplant the way videos are shown in the classroom.  For any of you who have shown movies the traditional ways, you know it can be an annoying, tedious process.  Before you can even show the movie, you have to get the approval of your principal by filling out that annoying permission form.  Many times (depending on your principal) they question you on how it follows the curriculum and how you are going to use it.  When you finally get approval, often times, parts of the movie are not applicable or you have to fast forward and skip to the part(s) you want to show.

With United Streaming, you don’t have to worry about these issues.  That’s because United Streaming is maintained by an off-shoot of the Discovery Channel called Discovery Education and all of the movies are “G’ rated.  Also, in most cases, if your county has approved United Streaming you shouldn’t have to get a permission form every time you show a movie or clip. 

            Another great feature of United Streaming is that you can show certain clips of the movies.  The clips are numbered and have a brief identification of the information shown in the clip.  You can go directly to that clip without worrying about finding the spot in the movie you want to show.  If this isn’t enough to get you on board with United Streaming, most movies will have tests or worksheets that go along with the movie. 

            All you need to do is put in your search word and the data base will pull up all of the movies that fall into that category.  You can find any category you want ranging from L.A. to Health and you can even do a search based on grade level.  You can also use the Discovery Education Atlas to focus your search on specific clips based on government, culture, history and natural world. 

            In the 8 years I have been teaching, I have shown only a handful of movies.  Along with the aforementioned issues with showing movies in the classroom, most movies that schools have in the media center are just not worth showing.  Ever since our county has approved and made United Streaming available, I have shown countless clips (sometimes only 2-3 minutes long) that allow my students to have a nice visual on the information being learned. 

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