I think that the three most important questions to consider when thinking about streaming video are does it serve an educational purpose, is it accessible to all students, and will it keep students actively engaged in learning?

    The first question deals with the content of the video.  If it enhances what is being taught and makes the concepts clearer to the learner, then it serves an educational purpose.  Too often people get caught up in the newness of technology and want to add things simply because they can.  This benefits no one.  If someone wants to incorporate streaming media into a presentation, the media needs to add something to the presentation that is necessary to the learning experience.  If the media is there simply because it “looks cool” then it is actually detracting from the presentation.  By keeping Blooms’s Taxonomy in mind when creating a video, the teacher can make sure that the video will enhance one or more of the 6 different levels of learning thus ensuring a strong educational purpose.

    Secondly, it is important to make sure that the media presentation is accessible to all students.  In other words, it can’t use so much bandwidth as to be unreachable to the available computers.  It also can’t follow a format that would be difficult to follow and/or operate by a student with disabilities.  It should always be accompanied by a text version in order to compensate for any problems that might be involved with the video.

    Finally, the video must keep the students’ attention, or it serves no purpose.  One way to keep someone’s attention is to raise the level of interactivity.  By allowing students some control over what they are seeing and how quickly they are seeing it, it is easier to keep them engaged.  An even higher level of interactivity, where the student can ask or answer questions would assure that the video is actually teaching what was intended.