Zane Education
Online learn classes for kids that make it easy on the homeschool moms. This program has easy to use videos and questions to help get you learning.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
My children are visual learners and love to watch videos. So I was excited to have the opportunity to review Zane Education.
My children are visual learners and love to watch videos. So I was excited to have the opportunity to review Zane Education.
Zane Education is a subscription-based site that has educational videos covering 260 topics, each with subtitled videos, lesson guides, and quizzes.
The exception is the math videos that are actually from Khan Academy, they are not subtitled as they were not created by Zane. Zane Education states that they believe they have found "The Missing Piece©" in education, videos with subtitles.
Zane has a study center that is very helpful for families. Inside this area, there are Zane's thesaurus and encyclopedia as well as a link to their downloadable catalog and video guides.
One that is of special use to our family is the Christian Learning Guide. A number of the Zane videos contain evolutionary teachings and this guide goes over the videos to point out things you may want to discuss with your children beforehand.
They say that all videos listed in the Christian Learning Guide match up with Christian beliefs, however, I would still recommend previewing all videos before showing them to your children. This is something I would do with any program as every family is unique in what they want to be viewed at differing ages.
My thoughts on Zane are mixed. I do appreciate the huge volume of educational material they have put together. For our family, I think it would work better as a supplement rather than our core.
The videos are informative but are more like a slideshow with audio and subtitles than a true video. My children liked them but not as much as a "normal" documentary, we would watch.
The videos could also not be made full screen so it was difficult for all of us to watch them at the same time. Each video did have a learning guide, but it was not the style that our family uses.
We are more of a Charlotte Mason and living books approach and use more narration than quizzes to assess our learning.
What worked for us was to use the videos as a resource to introduce a topic, then have the children narrate orally or write what they had learned.
