Education TV

I used to blog for my old company, but they took the blog down. I am
not actually allowed to own the writings I put up on that blog, but as
I reference them on occasion in my writing I am putting those articles
up in my archives here for reference sake. I'll put the tag GS on those
articles noting that they were originally published on the http://schoolfinder.globalscholar.com/blog/

Education TV

May 16, 2008 – 8:09 am by Brendan

Did you know the Department of Education has a TV studio? No not PBS in the mornings, though many of those kids shows are funded in part by a U.S. Department of Education, No Child Left Behind grant. It isn’t the Disney channel either, they don’t need funding. They are nice enough not to put commercials in their programs, unless you think of the entire show as one big commercial for Disney.

No, the Federal Department of Education has it’s own TV show and you can watch archives online. You can even subscribe and be the first person on your block to watch the show. Just be careful when signing up for the service, this is old school list serv stuff you have to use the correct syntax.

Actually, the shows will take live calls so watching it live is not a bad deal. The problem is finding it. That is why signing up is one good idea. You can also check thisbrochure from the DoE and see if the show is broadcast to your house.

I’m ripping on the DoE here a bit, but in reality video is a good medium to present some of these ideas. I used to watch the school board meetings at my last school, Second Street School, Frankfort Kentucky, on the local education channel. The real question is, why not use web simulcast and allow users anywhere to watch and chat in real time? Why not allow the audience to send in questions before hand that could be addressed on the show? Why not simulcast on a radio station?

What the DoE has in a TV station would have been on the forefront of technology in the 1950’s. In the 1950’s we could have looked at a government TV station and thought, “These people really care about the education of our children.” Today, I watch the Department of Education’s TV and I wonder why education has to lag 60 years behind the rest of the world.