Science education – effective use of video!

One of the biggest challenges we have in the K-12 environment is to keep kids interested and on task. Depending on how it’s used, technology can be either a great help or great hindrance in the quest to maintain interest and stay focused on learning.

Video-related sites like YouTube can be of immense value in this quest. The University of Nottingham has some really interesting science content in the form of YouTube video clips arranged around specific topics.

The first site of theirs is “The Periodic Table of Videos.” Pick an element on the periodic table and you’ll find a brief video explaining the element or giving facts about it. Go ahead – learn why we can’t live without Molybdenum in one minute! 🙂

I also like their “Sixty Symbols” site. These are longer videos about various symbols related to physics or astronomy. I’ll confess that I knew nothing about Schrödinger’s cat (do you?)and clicked a link to a video explaining the experiment. Would you rather hear someone talking about a cat in a box or read some material on the paradox of quantum superpositioning? Exactly.

I’m not a science guru, but I find these videos very interesting and I think it’s a great illustration as to how well-created video clips can be used to enhance (or change instruction as we know it.