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"A growing number of schools in Europe already have computer laboratories utilizing modern computers. Introductory courses on ICT are already integrated in primary school curricula or soon will be. It is about time, therefore, to revise existing or develop new ICT curricula. Something different, more advanced, and more exciting is needed, therefore, for the high school (and lyceum) curricula. We believe that one possible course of action would be to integrate the curriculum ICT teaching with the teaching of different subjects, while at the same time to combine different learning methods by paying more emphasis to students’ own actions and self-directed learning abilities. We believe that by combining tasks in the way shown in this paper, will prove to be very beneficial to the students. In education, the omnipresence of the web and the increased communications bandwidth has created, in effect, an integrated educational medium. Web-based video streaming technologies are expected to experience a rapid adoption by students and educators. In addition to maintaining the more traditional activities like text conferencing, whiteboards, video conferencing etc, video sequences can be integrated with or linked to slides by the use of simple use of ordinary internet browsers. This results to a seamless integration of digital video with other tools, hereby creating a Virtual Learning Environment. It also offers the opportunity to move beyond one-way video towards an interactive medium that complements, and adds visual richness to static text and graphic content. It is possible for streaming media to become a ubiquitous form of communication and to find application in every classroom. Nevertheless, there is currently an acute lack of research dealing with the use of existing streaming media for teaching and learning, despite the fact that streaming video is one of the best methods for introducing ICT (for the first time) in everyday school practice. In this paper, the results of an attempt to teach science using existing streaming media are presented." Relevant resource: The Science Laboratory demo site From the same author(s): "Streaming media as an alternative to direct student instruction for performing science experiments" PDF (http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/72/84/PDF/167_Final_Paper.pdf) and "Bridging the gap between digital technology and science education" (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4381181)

The physical demo site in Patras has been set up for one part the Science Laboratory of the University of Patras, School of Education. The Science Laboratory is dedicated to carrying out research in Science Education, including the application of science and ICT in education. The laboratory has expertise in evaluating new products and testing them for educational use, be these software, hardware, and/or methods of implementation in class. On a yearly basis, more than 180 future primary school teachers are trained here. The Laboratory also carries out in-service training for teachers in its particular fields of expertise. Within eStream, schools are invited to come to the university for a day in order to explore the demo site. 15 different science videos (science experiments), produced by the Science Laboratory, can be viewed at the demo site, together with the theoretical background to the experiments, via a website set up to this end: This is a small web site with recorded science experiments to explain scientific concepts in an understandable manner. The experiments on video are related to theory explanations on the site: http://estream.upatras.gr/index.html. Also in Greek available: http://users.sch.gr/spilios/air1.htm

Subtitle: Educational best practices and some first observations of their implementation. A review written by the eStream partnership, published in July 2005. The main aim of this publication is to summarise the efforts of eStream undertaken to gain more insight into the impact of streaming media technology on the quality of teaching and learning. The publication, therefore, includes the learning/teaching scenarios developed by the eStream partnership, together with some conclusions. Furthermore, the publication contains considerable information on general aspects of streaming media technology in education, taking into account that readers might be beginners interested in the topic, but with little background in the thematic area. The booklet closes with a chapter dedicated to emerging developments and their impact on streaming media. Also a German and Greek version available.