Video Usage In Schools Soars

A new, PBS-funded, Grunwald research report, is out and it shows that video usage in the classrooms is growing rapidly. “More than three-quarters (76 percent) of K-12 educators say they use digital media, up significantly from 69 percent in 2008. Of K-12 teachers who use digital media in the classroom, 80 percent are frequent or regular users.” The report states that “72 percent reported they stream or download content from the Internet.” Importantly, teachers who use digital media believe that it helps them and their students be more effective in the classroom.

I wonder how much of this is streaming Flash from free sites like YouTube? According to Jennifer Hillner of Edutopia, “YouTube is blocked in many classrooms because of inappropriate materials“. She indicates that some teachers are breaking the YouTube terms of service to download these videos for classroom use. Clearly there is a need to provide online video content for the classroom. What are their options? One is TeacherTube but this has advertising. A larger issue is whether the school networks can support the demand of streaming or downloading video from the Internet to each computer in the classroom.

As demand grows for streaming video in the classroom, a great opportunity exists to provide the infrastructure for reliable and network-friendly delivery.  There is the need for schools and school districts to create their own “Educational YouTube” where quality and access to age appropriate content can be controlled. VBrick has over 2000 customers who are doing this on their own networks already and we are seeing a huge increase in demand for our systems in schools.

In the future students and teachers will want to be able to watch video on PCs, TVs, as well as mobile handsets like the iPhone and Droid. Standards like H264 will enable this to be possible with a single, unified, platform.