Imagine a science teacher searching the web to find reliably sourced videos to make learning engaging and fun. After hours of searching, she finds one decent video that actually says what she wants it to, only to find a rather inappropriate video advertised on the side?

Every teacher’s nightmare, right?

Schools often face massive workloads – there is always something that needs to be prepared or improved upon; especially in science where the teachers have a lot of experiments to prepare and ensure that they work successfully.

Karen, a teacher and coordinator at the science department at the International School in Nice, was facing the exact same problems and turned to Twig for an easy solution. Here’s what she had to say:

'With Twig we have an easy search engine and related videos that are proposed to extend the topic. The videos are short and engaging for the students. They always look forward to them as the music, sound, and visuals are dynamic. They also know that they will be short, so they give them their full attention. Recently, I viewed a Twig Science Experiment with my class. They enjoyed it and I found it to be very comprehensive.

'Twig videos are well designed, with beautiful graphics and very thoughtful combinations of images. Students usually ask can I watch this at home? Students love them.'

Karen uses Twig as a starter to a topic or as a follow-up to reinforce the lesson. She also uses Twig for handouts to create a lesson where students can annotate the drawings.

'Using dynamic video always helps students to experience the material in another way and this helps their learning. Quickly finding what I need using Twig, means that I do not have to search the internet and screen videos for content.'

And Karen's students love Twig. She says, 'Those who use Twig for revision are greatly helped by having professional delivery and dynamic visualisations. Students are able to put into context difficult concepts especially with subjects like Chemistry, where many of the concepts are abstract, so to be able to see an animation of the atom or states of matter, really helps them put a concrete face on the material.

'This is an age where the two hemispheres of the brain are developing and strengthening their connections (synapses) to enable higher order abstract thinking. Watching well designed Twig videos really helps in this process.'

This is the school's fourth year using Twig. According to Karen the teachers who use it, request it. Everybody is always willing to use part of their budget towards it. In addition, when I looked at the usage we accessed Twig 1000 times over the year in Math and Science alone.

Well, what can we say? We'll just have to let our subscribers do the talking, won't we?

Merci Beaucoup for the feedback, Karen.

Written by Ishita Mandrekar

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