Posts Tagged ‘homeschool curriculum’

21st

Jan 2012

Online Visual Learning: Unique & Affordable

K-12 Educational Video with Subtitles Provides Improved Online Learning

A new online Visual Learning service to develop four specific and easily recognisable Visual Learning brands has been launched online by Zane Education at www.ZaneEducation.com .

The four easily identifiable channels; Zane Classroom, Zane Home Education, Zane Special Needs and Zane ExtraCurriculum, provide the education market in America and a range of other countries with a set of effective Visual Learning tools that can be used in different ways to benefit school and home educated children, children with a wide range of Special Needs, and students studying English as a Second Language.

At the core of the service is Zane’s unique educational video library, which is one of the few providers of education video that has been developed specifically for teaching the K-12 curriculum. This collection of educational video is unique in that Zane is the first online learning company to realize the importance of, and provide subtitles and closed captions for all of their education video.

More than 30 years successful research on subtitles and closed captions on video has been completed by people such as the late Alice Killackey of the Availll Institute and Dr.Brij Kothari amongst others, establishing the link between the use of closed captions on video, and improved reading and literacy skills. However Zane Education has been the first elearning company with the necessary resources to provide that closed captioning on education video, so as to enable children and students to study a wide range of curriculum topics – and improve their reading and literacy skills simultaneously. (more…)

Tags: educational video, elearning, homeschool curriculum, online educational video, online learning, special needs, teachers, Visual Learning
Category: Visual Learning
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3rd

Jul 2011

Curriculum for Homeschool

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…)

Tags: buying curriculum, curriculum for homeschooling, homeschool curriculum, Zane Education
Category: HomeSchool Tips
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20th

Jul 2010

From Homeschool & Homeschooling Roots

You’ve heard the expression ” I liked it so much, that I bought the company”? Well this one such story. But it is our own, and so it is fairly understandable that it is one we here at Zane Education are reasonably proud of.

In 1999 we were finally enjoying some of the fruits of a business we’d started some years before, distributing budget priced software. At the time we had been one of the first people to see the opportunity to specialize in the budget software market, and the business had taken off.

By 1999 we represented, and were distributing CD-ROM’s for a number of well established software publishers, and were very interested in the educational software market. One of those software publishers was a company by the name of Zane Publishing Inc. Zane had become very successfull educational software company publishing approximately 250 CD-ROM titles to support the K12 curriculum, and had sold literally millions of their CD-ROM’s into schools and homeschools across the country. When in 2000 we had the opportunity to buy Zane, we jumped at the opportunity.

We purchased Zane because we could see a time coming when software on CD-ROM would gradually die, and we could also see a time coming when being able to provide so much purpose developed K12 curriculum material online over the Internet, would provide some wonderful opportunities.

Well it’s taken nearly four years to complete this work however the end result is over 1,000 online videos teaching Art, Music, Literature, History, Science, Biology, Social Sciences, Geography, Library Skills, Health , Mathematics and Religious Studies covering 250 topics. In addition, for each topic we have built interactive quizzes to allow a student to test themselves on what they have learnt about that topic as they have watched the video. (more…)