Good resource to find educational videos on a specific topic at specific grade level
Community Review for Education on Demand
My Take
The site describes itself as "A non-profit organization to help teachers to save time and design more effective lessons without breaking the bank." I feel this statement is true- with the emphasis on "save time" and "without breaking the bank." I am all for the FREE sites on the web.
There are four major features that assist teachers in lesson design. The videos: are standards aligned, include supplemental resources (like teacher's guides or worksheets), are handpicked for the curated library of videos, and a teacher can create his/her own playlist to save appropriate videos.
The site has several filtering options that narrow the search for videos to what you desire. Teachers can search by category (topic), channels (source of the video), and grade level, including videos for teacher training and professional development presentations.
Every user must have an account- which is easy to set up, or the user can sign in using Google. From what I have seen, many of the videos are from youtube, so if your school blocks youtube this may be a problem (I'm not sure if they will work or not). After you use the appropriate filters for your search, you can hover the cursor over many of the titles and get a brief description of the video before switching pages to link to it. I find this a handy timesaver. The resources included with some of the videos seem quite helpful- teacher's guides with lesson plans, worksheets for students, and activities to do at home with parents.
As far as I can tell the channels are limited to eduondemand, Khan Academy, and Youtube. It would be great if there were more sources available like vimeo and TED.
The purpose of this site is to organize and sort videos to find informative ones for teaching. Therefore this is not a place where users interact with one another or apply what they have learned. It is on a basic knowledge-giving level. This is neither good nor bad... it is what it is. Lastly, there are no real accessibility supports for impaired learners- like closed captioning. That is a feature that the site might consider adding in the future.
How I Use It
This site includes three "channels"- eduondemand, Khan Academy, and youtube. I use youtube a lot, but sometimes cannot find just the right video for my purpose because of the sheer volume of videos to comb through on youtube. This site narrow the youtube videos to ones that might be right for my use and also includes the other sites. I have not used this site very much as of now, but I think I will be doing so in the future. It is one of the resources I have stored in my "toolbox".
Students may also find videos on this site that are useful to add to presentations to demonstrate their own learning. This can be a way for students to practice evaluating sources for their quality.