One of the great things about teaching today is the wealth of educational videos that are available on the web. No longer do we have to flip through catalogs, order a VHS cassette, wait for it to arrive, and hope that it is as good as the catalog made it sound. Now we can quickly access and screen educational videos. In fact, there is so much available that the challenge is sifting through it all. That’s why I occasionally publish lists like this one to help others find educational videos online. Here are ten good sources of science videos for students and teachers.
The Spangler Effect is a YouTube channel from Steve Spangler Science. Unlike his popular Sick Science videos which are no more than short demonstrations of science experiments students and parents can do at home, The Spangler Effect
videos offer longer (15 minutes or so) explanations of science
experiments. The Spangler Effect videos explain the science of
do-it-yourself experiments and how you can recreate those experiments at
home or in your classroom.
On his website and YouTube channel
Montana’s 2011 Teacher of the Year Paul Anderson has uploaded more than 300 quality instructional videos
like the ones about biology that are embedded below.
Gooru is a service that aims to provide
teachers and students with an extensive collection of videos,
interactive displays, documents, diagrams, and quizzes for learning
about topics in math and science. As a Gooru member you have access to hundreds of resources according to
subject areas such as chemistry, biology, ecology, algebra, calculus,
and more. Within each subject area you can look for resources according
to media type such as video, interactive display, slides, text, and
lesson plans. When you find resources that you want to use, drag them to
the resources folder within your account. Gooru also offers you the
option to add resources to your folders even if you did not find them
within Gooru.
Learners TV has organized hundreds of academic videos. They’ve also organized more than one hundred science animations. The science animations on Learners TV are organized into three categories; biology, physics, and chemistry.
ScienceFix is the blog and YouTube channel
of middle school science teacher Darren Fix. On both the blog and the
YouTube channel you will find more than 100 videos demonstrating various
science experiments, demonstrations, and middle school science lessons.
MIT Tech TV is a
collection of thousands videos produced by students and faculty at MIT.
The videos are arranged into more than 600 collections covering topics
in engineering, education, science, the humanities, and more. You can
view the videos online and most of them are available to download. Roughly 300 of the MIT Tech TV videos are also available on a YouTube channel of the same name.
There are a couple of playlists within the channel that could be of
interest to high school and middle school science teachers. MIT Engineering K-12 is a set of twenty-six videos in which MIT students explain and
demonstrate things like gas pressure, gravity, Boyle’s Law, and the
shape of sound waves. MIT Physics Demonstrations
is a playlist of 44 short demonstrations. The videos don’t have
narration, just the demonstration. The explanation of the principle
demonstrated is found in the description below each video.
Bright Storm’s YouTube channel
offers video lessons for biology, chemistry, and physics. The videos
are nothing more than an instructor lecturing with a whiteboard for a
few minutes which could be adequate if a student just needs a refresher
on a science topic.
NASA has a few different YouTube channels, but the one that has the most universal utility for teachers and students is NASA eClips.
NASA eClips is organized according to grade level with playlists
intended for elementary school, middle school, and high school.
Interactive Biology
is a website offering a series of videos, quizzes, and study guides for
biology students. The site offers study guides for sale, but there some
good free resources available too. The best free resource found on
Interactive Biology is the Interactive Biology YouTube channel. There are ten multiple choice quizzes
based on information in the videos and study guides. Each quiz offers
immediate feedback and provides a hint if you get a question wrong and
want to try it again.
John and Hank Green’s Crash Course channel on YouTube includes courses in chemistry, ecology, and biology. They’re good videos, but they do go quickly so your students might have to rewind them a couple of times to catch everything.
A note about Khan Academy: I left Khan Academy off the list because it’s the best known source of educational videos. Sal Khan doesn’t need my help promoting his stuff.
