United Streaming Video Paper Outline

The use of United Streaming: Video in education

Streaming video: Its use in Michigan and implications for education

Jon Margerum-Leys, Ph.D.

Commissioned by the Regional Educational Media Consortium (REMC) of Michigan

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Table of Contents

I.Introduction

Since 2002, content-rich streaming video has been available to Michigan schools. The Regional Educational Media Consortium (REMC) of Michigan has been a partner of United Streaming in helping to make schools aware of streaming video and in implementing its use for teaching and learning. This paper examines the factors influencing the use of streaming video in education, particularly as it is occurring in the state of Michigan. Because streaming video is relatively new, there is little literature on streaming video per se. Therefore, this paper considers streaming video in the context of multimedia and technology broadly defined, current trends in education (i.e., the standards movement), and factors which are at the fore in Michigan.

Two main sources inform the paper: The literature base and the experiences of educators in using United Streaming. When selecting literature for review for use in this paper, an emphasis was placed on publications which have appeared since 2000 and which are both widely available and from reputable sources. This emphasis resulted in the inclusion of about two dozen pieces, comprising journal articles, reports, white papers, books, book sections, and electronic sources. While some of these sources originate from potentially biased authors (i.e., United Streaming itself), these are balanced with more objective perspectives. In addition to pieces concerning multimedia, citations are made to literature on teacher knowledge, change in education, and broader teaching and learning issues.

As important as what can be found in the literature is the experiences of teachers and other educational professionals. Woven throughout this paper are quotes from teachers, school media specialists, and administrators. These educators were selected as representing a variety of educational contexts. Briefly, the educators who were interviewed and whose observations dot this paper are:

Seth Franklin[1] is a high school social studies teacher in an upper-middle-class suburban Detroit school district. Winfield high school is in a high growth area and is a very large school. There are eight other teachers in Mr. Franklin's department.

Ivana Ioanna is a sixth grade languages teacher in a blue collar Arab-American area of Detroit. She does not have a room of her own, instead traveling to various rooms throughout the school day. Her school has a language exploration program in which students are exposed to five languages (German, French, ASL, Spanish, and Arabic).

Carrie Knowlton is a library media specialist in a small blue collar town in southern Michigan, Ms. Knowlton interacts with all of the children during their media time. She also serves as a teacher leader, helping other teachers with media selection and some technological issues.

Charlie Nordin is a middle science teacher in a rural district in south-central Michigan. At his school, there are enough laptops for each student to have one for him or herself. The laptops were purchased through a Freedom to Learn project. See for a description. Each classroom also has a large television set which can project the image from the teacher's computer.

Nora Underwood is a first grade teacher in a blue collar Arab-American area of Detroit. Her school building was opened this year and still has that new school smell. Her classroom setup includes a large flat-screen television set which can display the teacher's computer screen.

In this paper, quoted observations from the teachers are set off from the text, appearing as single spaced paragraphs in a couriertypeface. Pronouns, gestures, and implied words are occasionally notated with parenthetical text added by the interviewer/author. If the speaker is not identified in the sentence preceding the quote, he or she is identified by pseudonym at the end of the block of text. Here's an example:

"I use (United Streaming) a lot. Like anything, when you bring in new technology, it takes a while to do the research into what can this do for me, learn to use it, how to apply it, so it took me a while to work through those types of things." –Mr. Nordin

Together, the educators quoted in this paper represent urban, suburban, and rural districts; blue collar and white collar communities; large and small schools; brand new and older school buildings; core curriculum and electives; and medium- to high-tech infrastructures. All have at least three years of experience with United Streaming and were chosen because they have considerable background in teaching and in using streaming video in their teaching. These teachers had a lot to say: The observations found in this document are condensed from twenty pages of single spaced notes taken in turn from hours of interview recordings. The contribution of these fine educators is very much appreciated.

II.Streaming video: An overview

A.What streaming video is

When information travels between computers on the Internet, it generally does so in the form of packets. Rather than sending an entire large file at once, the sending computer breaks up the file into small pieces, then wraps each piece in a packet for shipping across the network. Each packet is made up of a small string of digits. The string of digits, in turn, contains information about where on the Internet the digits are coming from and going to; what kind of information (e-mail, picture, sound, video, etc.) the packet is a part of; and of course the small piece of the file. Think of this process as being like taking a photograph of an artwork, turning the photograph into a jigsaw puzzle, wrapping each individual piece and putting a mailing label on it, then putting the individually wrapped pieces in the mailbox. At the recipient's end, each piece is unwrapped and information in the packet itself helps the recipient's computer to assemble the packets back into a complete file.

Historically, video and other media software was set up to handle an entire file as a discrete unit. An entire file would be cut into packets and sent. The recipient's computer would wait until all of the pieces had arrived, then assemble them into a complete file before allowing the recipient to open the file. This was a time-consuming process; in the example above, imagine waiting by the mailbox for all the pieces of the puzzle to arrive before being able to look at any of them.

Streaming takes a different approach to this process. Files are still cut into packets, but the packets are arranged so that the recipient can begin to see the file while parts of it are still being sent. The recipient's computer does not need to wait for the entire file to arrive. In the case of video, each clip is composed of thousands of individual pictures called frames. This composition lends itself well to streaming. When a computer user requests a video, the sending computer starts sending frames of the video encapsulated in packets. The recipient's computer waits until it has enough frames to start displaying the video, then begins to play the first part of the video as the remaining frames are sent. The software to accomplish this process is called a codec, which is short for encode/decode (Klass, 2003). At this time, the three most common codecs are Windows Media Player, Real Networks' RealPlayer, and Apple Computer's QuickTime.

Besides not waiting for an entire file to arrive, a streaming video codec performs another vital function: It throws the video file away (Hartsell & Yuen, 2006). Before streaming video, entire files would remain on a recipient's computer. This posed two problems. First, video files are very large. Leaving them on the recipient's computer could quickly fill that computer's hard drive and cause file management headaches. Second, many video files are copyrighted. By leaving the file on the recipient's computer, the door is left open for the recipient to send the video file to a third party, thereby violating the original copyright. Streaming video systems avoid both problems by deleting the video file, sometimes even as the video is being shown on the recipient's computer. Early frames of the video are sent, displayed, then thrown out as later frames of the video are displayed (Reed, 2001).

B.How streaming video is used

Streaming video is generally transported over the Internet or other computer networks, sent between computers, and accessed using a Web browser or dedicated streaming video software. The software needed to view streaming video is included with essentially all new computers and is free to the end user. Streaming video is equally capable of displaying live events and replaying stored video.

Because it is easy to use and inexpensive, streaming video is popular for a wide range of applications. In schools, streaming video is used as a means of communication, as source material for projects, and as a way for teachers to display content. School announcements and other communications can be streamed from a central location (principal's office or media center, for example) out to classrooms. Once the streaming video files have been created, they can also be displayed on school Web sites for parent and community viewing (Oderman, 2004).

Students can use streaming video clips as an embedded portion of PowerPoint files or other projects. Appropriate material is found through keyword searching or other means. The selected clips are approved by a classroom teacher and are used as a portion of the student-created product. This use of streaming video can be highly individualized. On the positive side, individualization allows students to engage with material which is most authentic to them. A potential drawback is the amount of equipment required for individualization and the increased complexity of managing such instruction.

Among the educators who were interviewed for this paper, streaming video is most commonly used to display teacher-selected content information. A teacher finds relevant video clips using keyword searching, reviews the clips to find the best match for her instructional goals, and as part of a lesson displays the video on a computer screen, large-screen television, or projector. This type of use of streaming video is not only the most frequently talked-about by teachers, it is the most frequently written-about use in the literature and the most supported use on the United Streaming Web site.

A theme which recurred in the interviews was the contrast between traditional video, which teachers saw as being a means of entertaining students so the teachers could get a break, and streaming video, which fills an educational purpose. Ms. Knowlton, an elementary media specialist, said this about video for use at her school:

"I'm not going to buy any more videos (tapes). It used to be that if a teacher was gone (absent), we got a lot of entertainment videos. You're not supposed to have that. This one I showed (today) was entertaining but it was connected to the curriculum I was teaching. Just to show a movie is frowned on."

III.United Streaming: An education-oriented instance of streaming video

A.Background

United Streaming is a product of Discovery Education, which is a division of Discovery Communications. According to the company Web site ( United Streaming's collection contains over 5,000 videos. These in turn are broken into over 50,000 segments, each of which is correlated with state standards and with keywords relating to the content of the video. The collection also contains still pictures, black line masters, quizzes, and lesson plans. Total size of this digital collection is over two terabytes. If the collection had to be put on floppy disks, about two million would be required. United Streaming obtains and distributes its content through "strategic partnerships with more than 25 public television stations across the country, its public service initiatives, products, and joint business ventures" ( accessed June 9, 2006). A Web-based interface to the collection allows teachers and/or students to search for videos by keyword, subject, and grade level.

In Michigan, United Streaming has been used since 2002. Key to United Streaming's success in Michigan are REMC and ISD partnerships. These partnerships have been beneficial in keeping prices for schools low. More importantly, REMC and ISD partnerships have increased visibility for the product through workshops, on site professional development, conference presentations, journal and magazine articles, and the professional networking of ISD personnel with teachers, media specialists, technology coordinators, and school administrators. All of the teachers interviewed for this paper first learned of the existence of United Streaming through ISD professional development efforts of one kind or another.

1.Usage patterns

Educational usage of the United Streaming collection has exploded in the years that the product has been available. As of 2005, over 2,700 Michigan schools had licenses to access United Streaming. Growth in use at individual schools has also been very swift in some instances. In one school in Washtenaw County, for example, views of videos have increased seventeen-fold in the last three years. As is discussed below, United Streaming represents a perfect storm in which robust school investment in technology infrastructure and growing teacher technological capabilities meet increasing availability of digital rights to media.

B.How United Streaming is currently funded

Funding models for United Streaming vary district to district, sometimes influenced by the local Intermediate School District (ISD) or Regional Educational Media Center (REMC). In Washtenaw County, for example, the ISD currently pays one third of the roughly $350 per building subscription cost for United Streaming. Other areas range from full funding by the local ISD or REMC to full funding by the local district.

IV.Themes from the literature and the interviews

In the following sections, this paper explores a set of themes related to the use of United Streaming, particularly as they interact with the context of Michigan schools. These themes were developed both through a reading of the literature and through listening to the voices of teachers and other educators.

A.Necessary conditions

For streaming video to have any chance of success, certain requirements must be met. In the literature, these baseline requirements were divided between technological and people requirements. Conversations with educators and intermediate school district (ISD) personnel focused mainly on technological requirements, though technological capabilities of teachers and students were also discussed.

1.Technology infrastructure

To be used effectively, United Streaming needs three things to be in place in a school's technological infrastructure:

A high speed, stable Internet connection.

Desktop or laptop computers with media player software

A means of displaying the video so that multiple students can see it.

Fortunately, these three necessary conditions are met in a large and growing set of schools in Michigan. The rise of streaming video represents either a happy coincidence or a natural evolution. A relatively robust technological infrastructure is required to use video streaming. But since this infrastructure exists, using video streaming is a very low cost endeavor. Ursula Kollinsworth, a support professional from an Intermediate School District, notes that

"The older the equipment, the more problems. (With) the newer the equipment, and a fast connection, there's no hardware complaint. There's just the teacher deciding to do it and figuring out how to do it."

Interestingly, this set of factors—modern hardware and software combined with a fast Internet connection-- can be looked at in reverse. With the rise of robust technological infrastructure in recent years, schools are hungry for effective educational materials which deliver value for their investment. While United Streaming requires a well-built infrastructure, this infrastructure in turn needs sound educational reasons to justify the substantial investment made by schools.

2.Technological requirement: Availability of hardware and software at the desktop

By modern standards, United Streaming does not require high tech hardware or software. Video clips are selected via a secure Web site, which can be accessed using any mainstream Web browser. Clips are viewed using Windows Media Player, a standard piece of software available for Macintosh and Windows computers and pre-installed on most computers. As with the bandwidth issue, most schools' existing infrastructure is sufficient for United Streaming's use. Again, this can be looked at in reverse: With increasing availability of basic computer technology in classrooms, schools are looking for effective ways of using their equipment. United Streaming fills this need.

3.Technological requirement: Bandwidth

The largest impediment to streaming video use is sufficient bandwidth (Bell, 2003; Hartsell & Yuen, 2006; Klass, 2003). If data is water then bandwidth can be thought of as the size of the pipe through which the water must pass. The more data which must be transmitted, the larger the needed pipe. Video is very data-intensive: Each frame of the video can be a separate picture and digital video can comprise as many as thirty frames per second. United Streaming's videos are 800 by 600 pixels and stream over the network at 262 Kbits per second. Even with compression, that's a lot of data.