NEW!! On-Demand K12 Online Educational Video Site for Teachers, Homeschool & Students – comments requested please!

Zane Education ( www.ZaneEducation.com ) has in the last 6 days launched the first on-demand online K12 educational video subscription website.

The site is currently free to use until December 1st while bug testing is completed and the subscription system is implemented.

The purpose of the website and our online videos is to provide teachers (and homeschoolers) with an alternative to having to spend hours searching YouTube for videos they can possibly use in the classroom and in the home

Zane has spent the last 4 years converting their library of 250 K12 educational CD-ROMs into approximately 1000 Flash-based online videos, all of which are now available on the www.ZaneEducation.com website.

The online videos include 250 curriculum topics and subjects include Art, Music, Literature, History, Geography, Science, Biology, Library Skills, Health and Social Sciences. Each topic is accompanied by online testing facilities in the form of interactive quizzes. This enables the student to watch the video and then test themselves on what they have learned.

A key feature of our educational videos is that they are subtitled giving the student the option to either listen to the presentation, or watch it on-screen. This enables them to also cater for the requirements of special needs students, students suffering from reading disabilities and sight impairments, as well as students learning English as a second language.

And so why am I making this posting here?

Well I would much appreciate some comments or feedback on the following questions:

1. How useful a resource are online videos for teachers in the classroom?

2. How many people are aware of the recent research carried out by the Availll Foundation (www.availll.com ) that appears to demonstrate the potential that subtitled videos have for increasing the reading literacy age level of the student using them as a learning tool? (Their research appears to indicate that subtitled video has the potential to improve the reading literacy age of a student by as much as 12 months in 12 weeks.)

3. What percentage of teachers are having to resort to spending their own time searching YouTube for videos that may be suitable to use in class?

4. If our video content was made available for other uses in the K12, in what ways could it be deployed to help improve what is available to teachers and homeschoolers?

5. In what other ways could our K12 videos be deployed to help improve the standard of K12 education?