The internet is filled with fabulous educational videos, but finding them can be tricky. Enter WatchKnowLearn, which gathers these videos from the internet and puts them in one organized, searchable place. The site currently offers about 50,000 videos on everything from osmosis to table manners to sign language to the philosophy of numbers.
The website, which was launched by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sangler, is designed to offer free access to thousands of education-related videos for students ages 3-18. Sanger describes it as “YouTube meets Wikipedia.”
What can you find on WatchKnowLearn? Nearly anything!
For instance, some of the videos currently available include:
- A short video about Minnesota from the History Channel
- Singing the alphabet with Elmo and India Aria
- A short geography video how Pangea split and the plates moved to form the world we now know.
- An animation of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
- A half hour video teaching about the history and culture of the religious Shaker movement.
- A vast assortment of math songs
- Schoolhouse Rock’s “How a bill becomes a law”
Doing a unit on clouds? A search produces hits in categories like meteorology, earth sciences and clouds, with options such as:
- Weather & Meteorology : How Do Clouds Form?
- Cool Clouds
- Mykie’s Lesson Plan 3: Clouds
- Different Types of Clouds (Time-Lapsed Photography)
- Cloud Rap
- New Cloud Type Name Proposed-Asperatus
- How To Classify Clouds
- Wow! Amazing Images of Storm Clouds
- Lesson for Painting Clouds
- “Going Outside”- Learn Weather and Outside Sign Language Words
These are just a few of the results just on page one of the results for clouds — and there are 116 pages of results!
Click here to visit the website and see all of the videos available. You can also set up your own classroom on the site to organize the videos you’d like to use in your homeschool. The search tool allows you to filter by age, and you can browse through subjects and many, many sub-categories to find great content.
The site was launched in October of 2009. The contributions have come from National Geographic, NASA, you-tube, eHow, private users and Google Videos, among many other sources.
This is a wonderful resource for putting together unit studies, accompanying curricula or just answering questions as they come up.