Posts Tagged ‘special needs’

9th

Jul 2012

Kiwibank Says No to Free Online Education for New Zealand Kids

And Special Needs Kids in New Zealand will need to wait for someone other than Kiwibank.

Making approaches to other business with proposals of one kind or another, is part of daily business for many companies, and sometimes those approaches bear fruit, other times they don’t – and that is all just part of business.

However when you approach an organisation, and attempt to open a discussion, with someone that is supposedly qualified to occupy a reasonably senior position of responsibility within the organisation, and then they refuse to return your calls, instead palming you off to a junior – that has to resort to out-and-out lies and blatant falsehoods as their excuse not to extend the most basic of courtesies – is simply appalling.

As a person that works in field of online education, I believe this is yet one more example of how we are continuing to producing generations of “dumbed-down” kids that have an inability to think for themselves, and certainly not creatively. It also demonstrates how relying on supposed educational qualifications – rather than common sense, is actually hurting business opportunity and inhibiting commercial growth, not only here in New Zealand, but many other countries too.

Being a Director of Zane Education – the owner of currently the largest fully subtitled educational video library currently available online – it is simply not commercially feasible for us to focus on an education market as small as that in New Zealand. However as a father – and a New Zealand citizen, I would love to be able to provide our Visual Learning resources to schools, students and special needs kids in New Zealand at no cost, so as to benefit them.

Being a person that likes to think outside the square, it had occurred to me that one of the most obvious choices available to me, was to team up with a bank so they could provide those resources to schools around New Zealand – and in doing so they would be seen to actively support education in a meaningful way. After all many banks have identified the youth and education markets as an important way of targeting young savers and future new customers. Currently those New Zealand banks attempting to build their brand in the education market are providing little more than lip-service, offering children free plastic piggy banks and providing minimalist advice about financial literacy – all of which may appear great, but is really doing little more than scratching the surface.
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Tags: children, education in new zealand, kiwi bank, kiwibank, national bank of new zealand, new zealand, nz, online education in New Zealand, special needs, Zane Education
Category: General Education, Latest Website News
Comments: No Comments

24th

Mar 2012

Educating Special Needs Children At Home

Education for Special Needs – The Sacrifice & The Benefits

I have so much respect and admiration for parents that make the committment to educate their child at home, particularly when that child requires Special Education.

Not only does it often mean that the decision for either Mom or Dad to give up working, or possibly even a career, it also means embarking on a course of challenging themselves to take on a role for which they have more than likely never been formally trained.

Homeschooling any child when you have never been trained as a teacher can be daunting enough if you have little or no understanding of what Home Educating entails, but to take on that committment when you know your child has Special Needs – and many parents must surely wonder if their best is going to be good enough – can only be seen as pretty much the ultimate demonstation of a depth of love that only a parent can have, or understand.

There are those that say that only a specially trained teacher or caregiver has the knowledge or expertise to educate and teach a Special Needs child, but I personally don’t know if I can buy into that. Surely having that level of patience that only a parent of a child can have, and having that intimate understanding of your own child’s abilities, mannerisms and personality, must play an awfully important part.

While in some ways having other more experienced homeschoolers to turn to for advice, support and encouragement can be beneficial, I believe there can be just as many pitfalls associated with doing that. Many homeschoolers make their own homeschooling activities unnecessaily expensive, overly time consuming and cumbersome. In addition many of their experiences might well not apply in the case of a Special Needs Child.

But there is a thought I have about educating a Special Needs child at home that I find particularly exciting.
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Tags: educational video, special needs, subtitled video
Category: Special Needs Students
Comments: 1 Comment

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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2nd

Nov 2011

Visual Learning

Visual Learning and Learning Styles – The Power and The Glory

Zane Education provides a highly effective online visual learning solution using subtitled educational video, quizzes, video study tools and free lesson plans. They provide online learning for 11 different subjects and 260+ topics, with more material being added all the time.

Schools, teachers, homeschoolers and students across the United States and in other countries are using Zane Education’s Visual Learning solution in their homes and classrooms as a valuable and trusted teaching resource.

While Zane Education offers an extremely affordable online learning solution with a single price subscription per family – irrelevant of the number of children involved and which literally slashes the cost of home education – the main reason they are becoming increasing popular is because Zane understands that each child has a preferred learning style, and that by using subtitled video to teach any topic, they are able to provide each child with the opportunity to process that information in the most effective way. In other words, each child is given the choice of watching, listening to, or reading each video presentation.

So the single most important feature of Zane Education’s Visual Learning solution is that it effectively provides and caters for virtually every learning style – with the exception of kinaesthetic learning, or learning by touch. (more…)

Tags: educational video, english as a second language, ESL, Learning Styles, special needs, Visual Learning
Category: Learning Styles, Visual Learning
Comments: No Comments

28th

Jan 2011

Visual Learning for Special Needs

Subtitled Educational Videos and Your Special Needs Child

We begin this fourth article in the series about Visual Learning by looking at exactly what Visual Learning is and what the term Special Needs is generally accepted to mean. Then as we move on we will examine how the various techniques and ways that subtitled educational video can be used to provide an effective way of achieving education advancement with your Special Needs child or student.

The definition of Visual Learning is “a teaching and learning style in which ideas, concepts, data and other information are associated with images and techniques. It is one of the three basic types of learning styles that also includes kinesthetic learning and auditory learning.” In other words, by using subtitled educational video to deliver curriculum material in a graphical format combined with the use of various techniques we are able to stimulate the learning process in a meaningful, interesting, enjoyable and effective manner.

And the term “special needs” generally applies to mental or physical disabilities or circumstances that create an exceptional situation requiring individualized educational programs, physical accessibility or primary care requirements.

Here at Zane Education we feel very strongly about the use of the term “Special Needs”. And the reason is because we believe that every child has special needs. Each one has the need to be loved, cared for, nurtured and educated. Each of these is a particularly special need that every child deserves. However what is of greatest importance is to understand and appreciate that every child is different, and the way we as teachers and parents accommodate and effectively provide for those needs, often comes down to each child’s individual personality. And when it comes to providing education that child’s individual abilities and preferences need to be understood and catered for if the learning process is to be meaningful and effective, especially if we desire to arouse and help develop that child’s powers of self-motivation.
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Tags: educational video, K12, multiple choice quizzes, special needs, subtitles, Visual Learning, Zane Education
Category: Special Needs Students, Visual Learning
Comments: No Comments

19th

Jan 2011

Educational Video and Social Media

One of the most frustrating things that we have come across in the last 9 months has been launching a website providing what is literally the world’s first subscription based service providing subtitled educational video on-demand for the education market.

While we are the first to appreciate that a lot of video is appearing on the internet over the last 12 months, being able to provide educational videos developed specifically for the K12 curriculum is important. What is significantly more important is that without exception, this is the first educational video that is subtitled.

So what is so important about subtitled video for education? Well research carried out by the Availll Institute has in recent years demonstrated the link between the use of subtitled video and significant improvement in children’s reading and literacy levels. So while the average child will benefit greatly, Zane Education also provides the ideal solution for students with Dyslexia and other Reading Difficulties in that it not only allows them to absorb and process the information without being held back by having to use textbooks, it also provides the means to overcome and improve their reading abilities. And other Special Needs students and children with austism and other learning disabilites benefit greatly too.

So what has this to do with Social Media. Well it’s all about getting the word out there so people can find what you have on offer and getting traffic to your website. Until the last year or so we have all had to rely on Google and Yahoo. And now there is Bing as well. But that so much relies on being able to get yourself onto the front pages of their search listings – which incidentally now is more unreliable as it has ever been. (more…)

Tags: autism, dyslexia, Educational Videos, Facebook, special needs, subtitled video, Zane Education
Category: Educational Videos
Comments: No Comments

6th

Sep 2010

Educating Special Needs Children

As a parent of a 13-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, I am very careful whenever I use the words special needs in connection with children.

On the one hand I believe that every child is a special needs child, simply because they are all individuals, each with their own special needs. Many of those special needs they have in common with other children – for example the need to be truly loved, cared for and nurtured – while for others their special needs might be more individually specific to them.

On the other hand however, special needs is often a term broadly applied to those either children that are advantaged in some way, while other children are described as being special needs because they are disadvantaged or have difficulties in other ways.

But there is another important reason why I am cautious about using the word special needs. The reason that I am cautious is because virtually every child that I have ever met that does suffer from a difficulty or disadvantage has also been absolutely blessed in another way. It is though they have been provided with something special that the rest of us don’t have, as though to compensate for the areas in which they have problems. And it is simply a matter of taking the time to discover what their special talent or ability is.

Without exception each and every child has their own way in which to receive and process information most effectively, and it is important that we as parents provide for our children a means by which both the child and the parent(s) can discover what that preferred learning style is for each child. From that point we can then take the necessary steps to provide the most effective education for that child by accommodating their preferred and most effective learning style.

And what I find particularly upsetting is that our education system as we know it today – often tries to dictate to a child what that preferred learning style should be. (more…)

Tags: Add new tag, gifted students, K12 educational video, special needs
Category: Special Needs Students
Comments: No Comments

31st

Aug 2010

Only One Front Page ……and 12 different education stories.

I have to apologize for a quiet time on the blog for the last 10 days but we have a dilemma to overcome.

Since we launched this website, an increasing number of people have contacted us and explained just how many different types of students can benefit through using our online educational videos.

Zane Education (Zane Publishing Inc. in it’s former life) has had a well-established name in the school and home education markets since the mid 1990’s. And when we decided to convert our 250 educational CD-ROM’s into online video we always expected that it was the teachers, students and homeschooling families that would be our main customers.

However now that we are using the online video format – and most importantly that all of our videos are subtitled – we are seeing that many other types of students are benefiting from what we have produced. Those children include special needs students, gifted students, the disabled, children with dyslexia and reading difficulties, students with visual impairments, ESL students and especially children whose parents and teachers want to help develop their reading skills.
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