As part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew, I received a 12 month Gold membership to the Zane Education website.
The Zane Education website offers 1544 videos on 384 topics for elementary, middle school, high school, college and adults. They also have lesson plans and quizzes.
Zane Education
The essential and ultra-affordable visual learning solution for home education that caters for each learning style.
Single subscription per family slashes cost to homeschool.
Enables students to study each topic effectively PLUS improve their reading and literacy skills at the same time.
Enables each child to study at their own speed, achieve their greatest potential and develop interest in their study.
Excellent homework help and revision aid and The Modern Tutor’s “Best Friend”
There are several ways you can use the website. You can view the videos by subject and topic. Choosing what you need for what your studying. You can also watch the videos by grade. The videos are divided into elementary, middle, high school, college and adult sections. It’s easy to find an appropriate video for your elementary student, say, instead of having to scroll through all of the videos to find one.
There are quite a few guides to help you get the most out of the videos. There are free User Guides available to download. Guides for traditional education and homeschool. Including several for Special Needs and English as a second language. The Video Catalogue and the Math Catalogue are pdf’s that list all of the videos available on the site, arranged by subject. The Learning Video Catalogue ebook, available for purchase or free with annual membership, is an indepth introduction to all 260 topics and subjects except for math. Also available is the Christian Home Learning Guide ebook.
Zane education is not a Christian site. There are several videos that refer to evolution. Just so your aware. They do have a few videos under the heading Religious Studies. They also have a Christian Home Learning Guide available. This is a great resource to have when using Zane. There is a really cool Timeline of Christian History included in the guide. The timeline starts with Adam & Eve and goes up to 1991. I will be printing the timeline out. The guide is divided by subject, with a listing of all the videos. Then there are several pages of articles on the subject. Followed by Scripture references, review questions, and suggested reading. The guide is available for purchase, or in some instances, free. See pricing below for more information.
The online educational videos are subtitled so the student can read along with the audio. This helps with their reading skills, also. It also means that kids with different learning styles can all watch the same video and learn the way they do best.
The website is easy to navigate. Older students will be able to access the videos themselves. Some younger students will be able to do it, too. There are a few health videos that you might not want younger students to watch, so you might want to be nearby to make sure they don’t go there.
There are online quizzes available for every video, except for the math videos. There are 23,000 curriculum-based questions throughout all the quizzes. The quizzes align with State and National Standards. At the end of every quiz, it is explained to the student why each answer was correct or incorrect. The site does not keep track of your quiz scores for you. At the end of each quiz, you can either print the results or email them to yourself. You could also keep a notebook for each student and record their grades in it.
The Study Centre is full of educational helps for the students. A dictionary, an encyclopedia, a thesaurus, a really neat video glossary and more. These are great to use not only while learning from the videos, but when the students are doing book work as well.
My kids liked that they could pick the subject they wanted to work on. They liked the videos they watched. They didn’t really care for the ones with writing on the screen the whole time, though, which I understand. We will continue to use Zane Education for this school year to go along with what we’re studying or to let the kids explore new topics.
While the subscriptions can be a bit pricey, if you have a student that learns better visually, this may be a good fit for your family. My suggestion is to go view the free videos, the demos and the math videos, so you can get an idea of how your family will use it. Then you can pick the least expensive membership that will work for your family. Or you may be like me, and have enough students to make the Gold membership worthwhile.
Zane Education offers several different pricing options.
-Free membership – access to the demo videos, ALL the math videos, and all the quizzes.
-Topic Taster – $5. a month- Same as free plus all the videos on one topic.
-Bronze – $8.99 a month or $98.89 a year – Same as free plus all videos by grade.
-Silver – $12.99 a month or $142.89 – Same as free plus all videos by subject.
-Gold – $17.99 a month or $197.89 – Same as free plus ALL the videos by topic, grade and subject. Plus the Christian Learning Guide and the Zane Home Learning Guide for free.
-The Zane Home Learning Guide and the Christian Learning Guide can be purchased for $49.95 each or are free with a one year subscription.
Zane Education is offering a 35% discount on the purchase of any annual 12-month Gold, Silver or BronzeMembership subscription through until the end of August 2012. Use Discount Promotion Code: ZE265HSM
*Disclosure of Material Connection: I received online access to Zane Education in the hope that I would mention it on my blog. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers. My opinions are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”