Zane Education Website released

After a couple of years of development I can now proudly say that Zane Education is finally up and running. What’s more, it’s FREE for the first 30 days.

My partner and I have been working on this for a long time now, along with Nicholas Tee over at Zane Publishing, we’ve spent the last few years converting all of the “Zane Publishing” Educational Video titles to digital format, converting the quizzes to digital format and building the website and membership system to deliver them, on-demand to the masses for low, affordable subscription costs.

The involvement and intensity of this site has been simply immense, an entirely, built from scratch, database driven website, which had to be easy to use, easy to navigate, yet look beautiful and function perfectly, delivering over 1000 videos and quizzes on-demand has been a challenge, but I think we’ve managed to come damn close with our 30 day release and when the 30 days is up you can expect to see much more in the way of navigational features, teacher resources and helpful how-to documents around the site. The site was literally a “ground-up” operation, unfortunately as much as I’m an open source advocate, nothing out their open or closed source was going to fit the bill for this project, so it was decided we would build this thing from scratch, from it’s first php tag to it’s last bash script.

Originally intended for home-schoolers, because of Zane Publishings original market, the site has become more of a vision for opportunity, we suddenly realised just after beginning the build, that teachers may want to use these videos, quizzes and resources as well. Let’s face it, we’re well and truly into the digital age now and I’ve been working in a school during the day for the last 8 months and discovered that teachers really do love to use a data projector, with visual aids and any other teacher resources they can find to help them in their role as “educators”, so why not open the site up to them as well? That’s exactly what we’re going to do, teachers will have the ability to search the sites extensive video collection for something that suits a topic they want to teach and buy an individual Video or Topic/Collection of Videos for less than $10 and use them for a month. Not to mention, we’re also building a schools based membership system for Educational Institutions to get special pricing and access to all of the sites resources for a yearly subscription fee, the ability to create teacher and student accounts in order to take full advantage of the site.

With free lesson plans and curriculum courses coming soon, teachers will hopefully love this site to bits, I’ve had some great feedback from some of the teachers I work with and I hope that trend will continue as more and more teachers discover the site. Home Schoolers will soon be able to earn money through the site’s affiliate program too. Any member of the site can also volunteer as a sudo-salesperson and earn themselves some money by recommending the site to their friends, other home schoolers and schools, the affiliate system should be available just shortly after the full launch of the site in 28 days time.

The “Christian Guide for Learning” is now in it’s final stages of conversion, from hardback to e-book format and will hopefully be released with the finished site in 28 days time, free sections of the book will be and are now available to all registered members, with 2 “pay for” sections available at around $25 USD each, or the whole book for around $40 USD, all to be released soon.

Music to Study By is a feature that’s already available to members who register now, a collection of music from the Baroque era, proven in recent studies to improve your concentration and learning abilities if you listen to it while studying.

World resources are offered in the form of “The CIA Factbook” and “World Leaders” directories, right there on the website, updated regularly the information can be invaluable to anyone trying to teach social studies or current affairs topics to children.

So pop on over to Zane Education and take a look for yourself, let us know here, or using the websites built in contact form what you think of it, suggestions you may have for more features etc, it’s all appreciated and after all the site was built with you in mind and it will continue to be that way, so suggestions are more imperative than just welcomed.

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