Science.TV Encourages Students to Create Science Videos
Streaming video is finding a home in the classroom, as attendees learned at the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London. Matt Thurling, founder and managing director of Science.TV, told how his company is turning students from passive video viewers to active video creators.
"What we're doing at Science.tv is building a community of interests, specifically to enhance the teaching and learning of science -- mostly at secondary school level. We're doing that in two main ways. One is the building of social and search tools to enable teachers -- it's very simple: to enable teachers and students to find what they're looking for with relevance to the curriculum that they may be studying, wherever they are in the world, so it's about curriculum-mapping. The other side of it is enabling our audience -- which, again, is mainly schools -- to create their own videos so that they become an active part of this community of interest," explained Thurling.
For Thurling, providing valuable science education videos means understanding what students need, but don't get, from other sites.
"Looking at the search side of things and these specific tools, I think there's a specific need for tools for this niche audience, because when you're studying science, you're looking at information in a different way. You're looking at it from the perspective of needing to take on a concept, and the best way I thought to demonstrate this would be -- say you're studying anatomy at a secondary level, and you need to know how the muscles work. If you type 'muscles' into a generic search engine like Google or YouTube, you're probably going to get someone trying to sell you steroids. But what you actually want is something that explains it to you, explains what you need to know," said Thurling.
Watch the full video below to hear what Thurling and others are doing to foster educational videos for the classroom.
It's Academic: Educational Video Inside and Outside the Classroom
From new content paradigms to student-created documentaries, schools and universities are relying on online video to shape the way learning moves into the future. Low-cost live streaming solutions, mobile video capture, and open-source video management have dropped the barriers to entry, and this session will discuss the innovative ways those technologies are being applied.
Moderator: Troy Dreier, Senior Associate Editor, StreamingMedia.com
Claudia J. Dold, Assistant Librarian, University of South Florida-Tampa
Julius Sowu, Marketing Director, Virtually Linked Ltd
Matt Thurling, Founder & MD, Science.tv
George Meek, Managing Director, EMEA, Kaltura