D.E.A.L. (Drop Everything and Listen)?

D.E.A.R. time or Drop Everything and Read, is a very popular activity in school today. In my old school we called it S.S.R. (Silent Sustained Reading). Whatever the case, I always looked forward to that time of the day so that I could read my latest adventure, something by Roald Dahl ;-)

The other day, in my computer class, 4th graders rolled out Dell laptops, hooked up their headphones and navigated to our streaming video service sponsored by United Streaming and WNED Thinkbright, something reminded me of the old D.E.A.R. times when I was a 3rd grade teacher and then an ephiphany happened. What if we listened to videos like we were going to read stories?

I told the kids we were going to have D.E.A.L. time for 10 minutes. They looked at me strangely, nothing new, but then were excited when I explained that we were going to watch a series of videos for 10 minutes without talking; we were going to DROP EVERYTHING AND LISTEN (D.E.A.L)! The excitement soon left their eyes when I told them the videos were about matter, but hey matter is IMPORTANT.

I showed them how to find my playlist, on the United Streaming servers, called Matter and how to stream videos. I staggered the start times of their viewing because we were going to be streaming videos through an Apple Extreme Base Station at 54 Mbps (802.11g). (this method seems to work much better than all of them starting at once, especially when wireless).

The objectives I planned for the lesson were to teach them how to:

• Use a customized playlist
• Pick a media player - they could choose Windows Media Player or Quicktime
• Use the streaming tools
• Use the controls on the media players
• Monitor their volume

So with objectives in mind, we dropped everything and listened to a few videos about matter.

The success of this endeavor got me thinking about other web sites that broadcast audio stories, newsreels or tutorials to students besides United Streaming. Here is a bookmarked list from my Linkagogo account - a list that will grow with your help. If you know of web sites that present AUDIO and/or VIDEO to students (of all age groups - I teach undergrads and grads too), add them to the comments below and I will add them to the Linkagogo Bookmarks.

Here are few items in the list so far:

• How the Alphabet Got its Order, presented by Starfall.com
• World War II videos from the History Channel
• Presidential speeches from the Internet Archive
• An interactive math glossary of terms from Harcourt Brace
• William Shakespeare's Plays and Poems in audio and video, presented by Wired for Books