Bringing Material into our Classroom
| August 28th, 2009I love it when we can watch internet TV. Last year I took a college class about management techniques. We had a text that we turned to for weekly assignments. In addition to weekly assignments and papers on the text, we had to relate the things we learned to The Office sitcom. It was absolutely hilarious. The professor did not know all that much about the show in the first place, which is funny because it was all his idea. He wanted to get the students involved in something that would keep out attention and apply the principles of the book.
Every few weeks a different group of students was in charge of presenting some of the principles to the class. When the group presented, each member was supposed to watch internet TV or with DVD’s, find the clip that we wanted to use, then pull it up for the class. Because the teacher didn’t know much about it, we would always have to be explaining the humor of the jokes in the episodes. After explaining all of the jokes then we would have the chance to explain the real purpose of the episodes in the class material. We would watch internet TV for about four clips that were presented by the different students. Usually it was only three or four minutes of material, but it quickly added up to a hilarious class.
We most often used the show for anti-examples of the principles in the text. We would show the clip and say, if he followed the guidelines from the text, Michael would have led the group this way. I think it was still a good teaching moment. We brought some of our lives in connection with the material and that is always a great way to really learn the material instead of just getting through it. Now that the episodes rerun a lot I think about the times I would watch internet TV and remember the lessons I learned from the class. Sometimes it took awhile to find the right episodes, but I bookmarked a few sites that made it easy to watch internet TV and find what I was looking for, without having to buy the CD’s.
The internet is great because you can get any kind of information as soon as you want to it seems like. I found the other day that I could also watch internet TV to catch up on the Rockies game when I could not find the right channel for it. The online broadcast was nearly as great as the TV would have been. Online, the site I found was not a broadcast exactly, but it was a computer generated update of the game. Pitch by pitch, it even showed where each ball came in the zone. So it was the active game score, the score of the pitches and a simulated view from the ump’s position of where each pitch was coming through.
I’m not sure about where the copyright laws come in for this kind of stuff. I do not support illegal downloading. The sites I saw were sponsored from the broadcasting companies. It seems like a lot of them show things online to get more attention to their television broadcasts. When it is a sponsored site like that, its ok to watch it. Sometimes they have copyright agreements come up before you watch internet TV that you will not download and share the show.
Its great to tune in on internet TV when you want to look something up, or if you want to watch a show without waiting for it to come up on cable.
