Video Distribution Systems and Georgia Public Broadcasting

Video Distributions Systems
Our Closed Circuit Cable System is known as Student Access Television (SATV). There are two channels that are broadcasted from the media center by the media specialist. The morning announcements are on from 7:55 to 8:00. Occasionally, it might run few minutes longer for special announcements from the principal or for the promotion of a big upcoming event. The show is broadcasted live on channel five in every homeroom by Closed Circuit TV. Channel nine is used for special programming to show recorded events like the Olympics from previous years, movies during the Olympics, information on the Constitution, and President Obama’s speech. Students from any grade level can submit an application to be up front or behind the scenes. Three students are selected to read the announcements and one for behind the scenes. The scripts and recordings are prepared by the media specialist. The opening scene starts with a picture of the school and background music followed by the pledge and daily reflection. Then the announcements are read and usually include after school events, lunch menu, sports tryouts, and reminders. Teachers do not have any input, but can send in requests to the media specialist to have club meeting dates and times or sports tryouts announced. The media specialist adds short clips at the end showing students participating in various activities throughout the day. Student participation in SATV is fun and exciting, and they're learning public speaking skills.

Georgia Public Broadcasting Digital Library
Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) Digital Library offers a wide collection of resources for students and educators. PBS is the only other channel that’s available for our students to view. Georgia Stories under the education link includes Podcasts, Georgia Performance Standards linked to video segments, field trips, historical documents, teaching resources, study guides, and an Index. The information can be accessed individually or by viewing all the content related to a subject. The site also has a variety of educational programs and activities for kids like the Salsa episodes that are in both English and Spanish. The Teacher’s Domain has free resources for the K-12 classrooms and professional learning. I did not know that these resources were available on GPB. Raising Readers for PBS Kids and Parent Resources are additional useful educational resources. United Streaming is available at our school. I now can access it by going to gpb.unitedstreaming.com.

Social Networking in the Media Center?

What an interesting concept. My initial response was you have got to be kidding me, what a waste of time. But upon further research many ideas have come to mind on how using social networking tools could be useful to a media center.

Let’s face it the 21^st Century Learner is constantly coming into contact with numerous social networking tools. We as media specialist are in the business of teaching and training students and teachers in how to use the Web 2.0 social networking applications that are available to them. Because of this it becomes extremely important for us to know the types of technology that they are coming into contact with and to inform them of the best way to utilize it. So far I have not seen any media center utilizing social networking sites. I believe that is because I have only been around elementary schools. I think that the higher up that you go in education these become more utilized tools.

The article Social Networking and Your Library OPAC! Written by Barbara Fiehn http://www.mmischools.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=59618 ) discussed ways in which social networking is being integrated into the OPAC. She discussed how Christopher Harris has created a library portal (Fish4Info, http://fish4info.org/gofish ) that “provides about half of the BOCES libraries the capability to append pathfinders, calendars, students’ book reviews, tagging, book ratings, and social bookmarking to the system wide catalog.” Including it with the OPAC would be a great way for stakeholders to have access to many Web 2.0 applications.

After reading some articles on social networking I have come up with some ideas on how to incorporate it into the media center.

1.       Create a Facebook account and befriend students. You could tell about upcoming library events on it.

2.       Teach grade levels how to create a blog and then allow them to participate in a discussion about a particular book that they have to read. The media specialist and teachers could pose questions and the students could discuss them.

3.       Join Flickr and post pictures from media center events on the site and befriend students and parents. Teachers could also join and post pictures from their particular classes.

4.       Start a media center blog on book reviews. Choose a book to read and then after 2 weeks start a book discussion.

5.       Start up a blog during the summer, “The best book I read so far this summer is…”. This will allow students to communicate during the summer and read some great books that they can share with others.

With all Web 2.0 social networking tools there are numerous possibilities of how you can use them. The point of the matter is that we need to be using them because students are using social networking sites on a daily basis and this is a great way to reach out and connect to them. By utilizing the social networking sites as educational tools it allows learning to be fun for students.

Should We DumpThe Media Center Web Page And Make It A Blog Or A Wiki?

Creating and maintaing a school's library website requires experience and time. Many Media specialists don't have the skills to build a website nor the time to maintain one. In addition, school districts impose many restrictions on web sites, which make it difficult to be controlled by the media sprcialist. Both blogs and wikis allow immediate publishing and editing, whereas the traditional web page sites require that the update and pages be uploaded through a file transfer protocol. Due to the time involved, web pages are not updated to keep up with current information.
Blogs and wikis are alternatives to web pages as sources for online promotion of the media program. They are great collaborative tools. You can easily create new pages and add links to resources without having any prior experience. Information can be added in a timely manner. They can be maintained by someone other than the media specialist, like parent volunteers. Both have excellent security measures as to participation and usage. Most of the applications are readily available, free, and can be accessed from a location other than school.
With time, cost, and restriction being factors in media web page design, media specialists are creating blogs and wikis to povide information to it users. They are becoming more popular and may be the answer to traditional web pages. I think they will work well with media specialists that are reluctant to use technology.

Here's an example of a library blog: http://blossomwoodlibrary.edublogs.org/

Using a WIKI in a Media Center

     Originally when I started thinking about using a WIKI in a media center I thought there is no way that I would. The reason that I do not like using a WIKI is the aspect that anyone can change the content. Now that I have done more research on WIKI’s, I have found out some great uses for them.

     Becky Small had some great ideas about how to use WIKI’s. Some of her examples were to do Science Fair Projects, Collaborative Textbooks, Student Portfolios, WIKI Organization, Collaborative Understanding, and Collaboration between teachers, and Literature Circle in Elementary Schools (http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/wiki_in_a_K-12_classroom). Amy Bowllan created a lesson plan on the book The Mzungu Boy and designed it as a WIKI (themzunguboy.wetpaint.com). This is a great idea to allow students to engage interactively with a lesson. Both of these ladies had some good ideas of how to use a WIKI but I still was not convinced that a WIKI would be that beneficial in a media center until I checked out the Decatur High School’s Library WIKI (http://dhs.wikispaces.com). What a great way to compile a lot of resources into one place. The things that impressed me about it were the pathfinders and the professional links. There were so many useful resources that teachers and students could use which was really great. Some ideas for creating a WIKI would be to:

·         Tell about your media center.

·         Have a link for upcoming events.

·         Have a link showing pictures of events that have taken place.

·         Have links for every subject area that teachers and students could use when they are searching for materials. When teachers find an excellent website they can add them to the list.

·         You could have a link to your library catalog and also to the public library (in case you do not have resources that stakeholders are looking for).

·         Have a link to book reviews to encourage checking out books that have slow circulation.

·         Have a link to book reviews that student can write.

·         Put tips on how to solve different technology issues and other stakeholders could add to this when they solve an issue.

     So as you can see there are many possibilities of how a WIKI could be used in a media center. A WIKI is definitely useful if you have information that needs to be readily accessible to many different users. Individuals could access the WIKI from any computer which makes it extremely convenient. Since anyone can create and edit content on a WIKI it will be extremely important to have someone that is in charge of checking the WIKI on a regular basis to make sure that nothing important is getting deleted and to make sure that there is not any inappropriate content being added to the WIKI.