Content Curation according to Wikipedia is defined as – the process of gathering information relevant to a topic or area of interest, usually with the intention of adding value select, organize, and look after the items in a collection or exhibition. I believe the biggest value that Video Guru brings to online and especially visual learning for kids is content curation. The content we are focusing on right now is educational videos for K-12 curriculum. Our goal is to understand the curriculum for each grade and select the best quality publicly available videos which best explain the concepts for children to learn from.
We believe textbooks are still essential and is a great starting point for learning. But with today’s content that is available on the internet, there are many topics in the K-12 education where the learning can be further enhanced by visual learning especially using videos. As parents know very well, allowing children to go to YouTube and other video services unsupervised is very risky. It is very easy for children to get diverted away from the educational content to the millions of inappropriate and addictive videos. In addition, if a parent, teacher, tutor or student goes to YouTube and searches for a topic, hundreds of video results come back. They would have to spend many hours going through each of them to find out which videos cover the content well and keep the attention of the kids. Therefore, we feel curation is extremely important especially for the following reasons –
There is a lot of good content
There is definitely a lot of good content available on the internet today. The problem is finding them, making sure they are age appropriate and engaging for the target student age.
There is a lot of bad content
Today on YouTube a parent or teacher can spend time and curate a playlist for their students. But the problem is they can easily get distracted away by related videos and ads. There is simply too much inappropriate content on YouTube to leave a kid alone there.
The available content is not organized
We add value to each video by adding a custom description of why that video fits a curriculum topic and link to the topic on NGSS (for science) website. For each video we select to add to Video Guru we think of whether the content –
- explains a curriculum topic well and
- is age appropriate,
- engaging
- appropriate length
- high quality content
- funny if possible, especially for younger kids
We hope to hear from parents, and teachers and students about our website. Please contact me using the contact form in the About Us page.
