ABC makes an educational Splash

ABC Splash “…is a new education website for Australia, packed with 100s of videos, audio clips and games. Totally free to watch and play at home and in school.” It does in fact have a nice range of videos and activities and, importantly, they are tied into the Australian curriculum. It’s the combination of this last fact plus presentations with Australian accents that has the potential to make this a valuable resource for both primary and high school kids.

If anyone else was doing this I’d probably view it as a counter to the wealth of materials now available on Youtube. But this is the sort of thing the ABC does, and tends to do well. Splash is no exception. It is nicely designed and launches with a good range of materials, although its value will increase as the depth of materials available increases.

Right now it’s a roll of the dice as to whether there’s something pertinent to what you’re interested in.  If nothing else the ABC cannot be short of archival footage and there would be value in explicitly indexing that to the curriculum. When the items in each subject area grow to the hundreds and thousands rather than the tens, there’ll be more chance of always finding something useful.

Just by-the-by, and this is a comment on the curriculum more than the Splash site, but it’s sad it appears to be not possible to discuss civil rights in an Australian context rather than one from the USA. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are important for any broadly educated person; but shouldn’t we be looking at what has, and has not, happened in our own country?

Sorry, back to Splash: The site is officially in beta and is well worth keeping an eye on through their email updates or Twitter feed to see how it develops.

Take a look at: splash.abc.net.au.

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