Cosmeo.com This site is AWESOME ~ tons of Discovery Educational videos, games, etc. and we love Nutshell Math. It is by subscription, but at only 9.95 a month it is well worth it!! tigerhomes.org Lots of big cats and live webcams, too fun!! Lemurs too... sat-preparation.co.il For high school kids, this site is great for preparing for the SAT.
That's interesting... so you like cosmeo? I tried it last summer but cancelled during the trial period. It seemed to be mostly empty except for the videos, which there appeared to be thousands of. However after browsing and searching for a while I figured out that the videos were actually listed as chapters, so one 20-minute video might be broken up into a bunch of 3-minute segments and listed separately, making categories and search results look longer than they actually were. There were still some very interesting videos that I looked at (and also saved locally, they don't block RA stream grabbers) but the video was so small and heavily compressed that it was not easily viewable. I called them to cancel the trial and the person who accepted my cancellation was very receptive to my feedback and said that she would send it to the right people. If they increased the video size and quality to at least youtube levels then I could see it being more useful.
Hmm...we haven't had any problems with running the videos at full screen mode and on our computer it is just like watching the Discovery channel, very clear. Maybe it is our graphics capability on this computer that makes the difference, either that or they improved the quality since you tried it. Maybe your suggestions helped! I know it is not very old, so I'm sure they are continually improving it. We've only been members for 3 months... For Spanish and French the kids love the show on there called Extra, it is really cute. We also really appreciate the Nutshell Math, it has very thorough explainations of all levels of math topics and you can set it to teach directly from a number of math textbooks. They are adding new stuff all the time, and I like to use the videos to connect to things we are doing in our core curriculum, just for variety. Having them broken up into segments helps me, because I can isolate various points for highlighting without making them watch the entire program. I know what you mean though about how it makes it look like there is more than there actually is. In a way it is good, because who wants to try to choose from 498 videos on the Great Depression?! Michelle
