Last week I attended the KidzattheCentre conference in New Plymouth, hosted by the Taranaki APs and DPs association. It was a most enjoyable time amongst a group of people with an obvious passion for what they do and a desire to learn more to improve and develop what is happening in their schools.

One of the delegates shared with me some exciting things that had happened in his school with one of his staff who had introduced some of the Khan videos to his students to help them understand a range of mathematical concepts when they were finding it difficult to do so in class. The significant benefits this teacher felt were offered were (a) the step-by-step process that explained each concept clearly for the students and (b) the fact tht the student could rewind this learning at any stage if there was a point they didn't get or if the explanation was moving too quickly for them. 

There's a third benefit of using these sorts of videos as a part of the learning resources you make available to students – illustrating processes, products and environments that the student wouldn't otherwise be able to see in the classroom environment. That's where the collection of online video resources from MITvideo looks to be useful.

The collection has over 10,000 educational videos organized into more than 150 channels, the largest channelbeing the Open Courseware channel that contains more than 2,300 lectures from MIT's open courses. All of the videos are either MIT productions or videos approved by editors at MIT Video. Some videos are hosted by MIT Video while others are from YouTube.

From the brief scan of the science titles I've done there's plenty here that could be used to support science teaching at the senior secondary level, for instance.