PBS Wants Our Advice

I�m going to have the opportunity next week, along with four other teachers from my school, to meet with some folks from PBS to give them some advice about how better to serve education. One of our teachers serves on the district�s Educational Technology Advisory Committee along with a community member who just happens to be a general manager at PBS. He has been so impressed with what Anne Smith has said about what we are doing at AHS that he would like to meet with some of us to see how we think PBS can better meet our needs. Here�s what he wants to know:

It was not long ago that PBS had a clear lead on competitors with regard to the use of video in the classroom. That lead has, to a great extent, evaporated . . . we have yielded the lead to Discovery/unitedstreaming.

There is new leadership at PBS that has placed a priority on regaining our position in educational services but the question is being asked as to what that looks like . . . When I found out that Anne had experience with Discovery/unitedstreaming, I also found that she had some fantastic ideas about what is lacking in that service and what is needed in the future. With all of my involvement at PBS, I had not heard any of this at the system level.

Here are the questions he�d like us to address:

• What are the shortcomings of Discovery/unitedstreaming and what can public television provide?
  
  
• Educational media is much more than just streaming video. What else needs to be provided and how?
  
  
• What are the shortcomings of what PBS offers at the moment?

Now, the five of us certainly have our own ideas, but it seemed a shame to me to limit this conversation to just our ideas. So I�m asking my staff for their input, as well as the extended readership of this blog outside of my building. If you have thoughts about this � particularly if you have used unitedstreaming or something similar for a while (we just started this fall) � please take the time to comment before next Tuesday afternoon. (Even if you haven�t used unitedstreaming or it�s after next Tuesday, comment anyway � I�ll pass the information along.) PBS seems to genuinely want to provide better service to education and � gasp � has decided to ask teachers what they think. This is an opportunity that doesn�t come along all that often and I think we need to take advantage of this to tell them what we want and need.

Tags:

• video
• PBS
• unitedstreaming