Posts Tagged ‘Zane Education’

Free Lesson Plans

Posted on: July 7th, 2011 by admin No Comments

Lesson Plans Now Provided Free by Zane Education

Online K12 education video provider Zane Education is in the process of adding a range of new educational tools and resources to complement and enhance the value of using their online curriculum-based educational video library. The latest addition is the introduction of free Lesson Plan guides for each of the 260 topics that are taught using their online videos.

The company made a decision to provide these Lesson Plan Guides for downloading at no cost, firstly to help reduce the cost of homeschooling, but also to enable homeschool parents and teachers in the classroom to spend more time doing what they do best – teaching and homeschool parenting. By providing these Lesson Plans to subscribers of their ondemand Visual Learning service, the company wants to enable teachers and homeschool parents to use the Lesson Plans as the framework to teach and explore each particular topic, then use the online K12 video as the means to deliver the facts in the same way that a text book would, thereby leaving them with more time to explore the other activities provided for in the Lesson Plan, and to actually interact with those children that require more help. (more…)

Curriculum for Homeschool

Posted on: July 3rd, 2011 by admin No Comments

Homeschool Curriculum – Why Spend Money Unnecessarily?

For many homeschoolers this article will hopefully clarify a number of myths about what Curriculum is, and at the same time will hopefully save many more of you a lot of money in the future!

The word ‘Curriculum’ is one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the world of homeschooling – and for a large number of homeschoolers it takes on an almost mythical status. And so often when I hear people discussing Homeschool Curriculum or Curriculum for Homeschooling, I find that I often have to restrain myself from saying anything. Why? Well let’s look first at what it actually means, and then secondly, the reasons why you are homeschooling.

Search online and you will quickly find that the definition of the word Curriculum when used in reference to education is ‘The subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college.’ Two further definitions indicate that it means ‘All the courses of study offered by an educational institution’ or ‘A group of related courses, often in a special field of study’. So what many homeschool suppliers are selling labeled as being Curriculum, really isn’t Curriculum at all.

But let’s put that aside for a minute so we can ask this question. Isn’t one of the reasons why many of us are homeschooling because we have lost faith in what our schools and the education system has to offer, believing we can do better ourselves? So why spend money buying a list of subjects that the same education system in which we have lost faith, thinks we ought to be teaching our children? (more…)

The Power of Combining Educational Videos with Subtitles

Posted on: May 7th, 2011 by admin 1 Comment

They say that every cloud has a silver lining, however sometimes it is not always obvious at first glance. And sometimes it can take as long as four years for that silver lining to become obvious. And this is one such situation that I going to share with you.

As the founder of Zane Education, it just on 10 years ago that I made a successful offer to buy a company called Zane Publishing Inc., a company that had previously been one of the leading educational software publishers, developing over 260 CD-ROM titles to provide teaching and testing for 260 topics for the K-12 curriculum.

The reason for wanting to buy Zane Publishing was simple. I could envision a time when being able to deliver so much wonderful curriculum-based educational content online would be invaluable. So here we are several years later having produced – and now delivering on the Zane Education website – over 1,000 online educational videos, with each of the 260 topics across 11 subjects, being provided with online interactive quizzes containing over 23,000 questions that continue the learning process by explaining why each answer is correct or incorrect.

The fact that every video was captioned, or provided subtitles – now being called by some as SMS or ‘same language subtitles’ – was purely coincidental because that was the original format provided by the original software. Some have described this style of presentation dated or old-fashion, however we understood that by presenting the videos in this format we provided each child with the option to watch, listen to, or read each presentation, and in doing so, catering for a range of learning styles and abilities. But I will be the first to admit that I never fully appreciated the true value of what we had.

The fact that all of our educational video content is developed specifically to meet the requirements of the curriculum – and not simply video of a general educational nature, and because we are able to provide such a valuable form of online testing – again specifically developed originally to help continue the learning process, we are well aware that our service offers a significantly better educational solution than those other websites simply providing collections of video of just a general educational nature. So in providing a service that truly has a potential global audience, we recently made the decision to launch a fund-raising that would bring in equity investors to give us the financial strength to market our online subscription service, much more effectively. (more…)