I have a question for all of you home schoolers: Have you ever ran out of resources on a particular subject? Well, Watchknow aims change all that by amassing a plethora of valuable educational resources in one place. Their goal is to allow your children to leverage the power of the new media in order to get advice from subject matter experts from around the world.
Watchknow indexes and organizes open source educational videos and makes them available for anyone to use. Rather than having to search various places for educational videos, Watchknow’s staff of educational professionals gather them from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
According to the developers of the site, here are the things that make Watchknow different than other educational sites:
WatchKnow (1) organizes videos (2) for students. We are (3) managed by education professionals but (4) are an open, collaborative community. We’re set up to build the place kids will want to come to for extra help online.
- We are focused on collecting rather than hosting materials. We do not want to build “yet another” educational resource collection, but instead an exhaustive directory of all the best educational, watchable media for children that we can find online.
- Our content is aimed at students. Many educational video projects online, like SchoolTube or Edutopia, cover a lot of other material as well, like teacher education and lesson plans, and videos made by students. We’re more focused.
- And we are serious about this. Unlike YouTube and TeacherTube again, we are non-profit. We make an active management role for the relevant experts: teachers and others. They are not merely reviewers, they can actually take the lead in building the website.
- The goal of organizing educational videos for kids is very ambitious. We think the most effective way to do this is to set up an open community. So that’s what we are. We aren’t just a database put together “in-house” or by a computer program. We’re people working together.
The service is currently in beta, but is open for use by everyone. It looks like a promising place where kids can get expert advice, or where home schooling parents can brush up on their skills before they teach a subject.
I don’t home school (yet), but if there are any home schoolers with other great online resources – please let me know and I’ll post them in a future article!
classroom, Education, education professionals, educational professionals, educational resource, educational sites, educational videos, home schoolers, Homeschooling, school, teacher education, video, Watchknow
