Educational Broadcast – Connecting Our Community

Since 2000, SLOCOE has served as the educational grantee of San Luis Obispo County’s PEG (Public, Education, and Government) Access Grant. In this capacity, SLOCOE manages the broadcast and curates the programming of COETV on Charter Cable (now Spectrum). Over the course of these 17 years, many changes have taken place in the areas of video streaming technology, consumer media consumption habits, and the use of educational media in support of instruction and learning – and COE-TV continues to evolve to meet the educational media needs of our community.

Recently, COETV expanded its programming reach to a second channel, splitting K-12 educational programming onto channel 19 and adult and post-secondary educational programming onto channel 2. This change has provided more programming hours for a growing collection of local and regional educational producers, including Cuesta College and Cal Poly University. Similarly, in the area of K-12 programming, COETV now has a greater capacity to accommodate local student content producers as well as our math homework assistance show, Do the Math. To supplement this local content, COETV also broadcasts licensed, Common Core-aligned programming from Scholastic and other producers, syndicated educational programming from NASA, Big History Project and the National Science Foundation, as well as open course content from Yale and presentations from the likes of Ken Robinson, Michael Pollan and Carol Dweck. During the overnight hours, COETV has added classic movies in the public domain, including The Three Musketeers, Gulliver’s Travels, and A Farewell to Arms.

Looking to the future, COETV will be expanding its broadcast reach beyond cable subscribers to include live online streaming of both channels, as well as an on-demand library of many broadcast titles. We will also be exploring distribution on alternate media platforms, such as Roku and Apple TV. If you know of local educational video content that would benefit our broadcast community, please contact me.

Michael Garrett
Manager, Educational Technology Center (ETC)
San Luis Obispo County Office of Education (SLOCOE)
Secretary, California Counties Educational Technology Consortium (CCETC)
Ph: 805.782.7290
Fax: 805.544.5174
mgarrett@slocoe.org
www.etcportal.org