Good News and Bad News
Discovery Education has launched a new online homework help service for home use called Cosmeo.
Because it is a service of the same company that provides unitedstreaming online media, it has a lot of video files available as part of the service. It seems to be a fairly rich resource for students to use at home. That’s the good news.
The bad news comes in two parts. First, the organization of the videos is kind of kludgy. You can browse by content area, or you can actually go into an area that helps you match videos to standards. I tried the latter, and it is decidedly un-helpful. For instance, I went in to look at videos mapped to the grade 10 Language Arts standards. I was presented with a ginormous list of every langauge arts standard, dozens and dozens. From this list, I selected
GR10 - 2.2.4.a. Recognize and use previously taught organizational structures (description, comparison and contrast, sequential order, chronological order, cause and effect, order of importance, process/procedural, concept/definition, problem/solution, episodic, and generalization/principle) to aid comprehension.
I was then taken to a page listing, among other things, videos on using big books with first graders, a health film on the birth of a baby, and a history film on the aftermath of World War I. None of the films list how or why they are matched with that standard, which would be nice to know before downloading and watching a film between 15 and 45 minutes in length. Under some of the standards, despite there being an active link, there are no films of any kind listed. When you hit the Back button, you are greeted with an annoying browser message that the previous page used a form, and asking if you want to send it again.
Still, I assume that some of these issues will be fixed sometime, and this will develop into a very handy resource. That’s where the next problem arises - this costs money. An annual subscription is $99. That’s all well and good for a middle-class family, but what about families with lower income? Just when the cost of computers is finally falling to the point where the digital divide may begin to fade, we find ways to provide a new kind of resource that may not be available to all of our community.
The King County library system does a wonderful job of purchasing services like this for use of its patrons, which is great resource for lower-income families. However, I worry about other communities that don’t have a forward-thinking library like this (or a library at all!)