Sal Khan did a stupendous thing with his Academy. Imagine – any kid anywhere in the world can have a math/science tutor who graduated with honors from MIT and made millions managing a hedge fund. And that tutor is available 24/7, instantly, on demand in your home or anywhere you please. Free.
Show Me is potentially better still. Rather than one really brilliant guy doing all the work, Show Me crowd sources the job to educators everywhere. Thousands and thousands of Khans can contribute short, video tutorials.
The site has social elements that are pretty much mandatory these days: you can upvote (or ‘heart’) tutorials, you can embed them in your own LMS, and of course share content via the usual suspects like FB and Twitter.
The potential is vast. If ShowMe catches fire, it could become a truly great thing. But for now it has its limitations – you need an iPad to create a Showme (rules me out, probably for a very long time if not forever), and that may be why the tutorials can appear ducky and uneven and the selection remains limited.
For example, if the most popular History tutorial is that ‘Thirteen Colonies’ piece, then ShowMe has a long way to go indeed.
Here’s the most popular tutorial available in the ‘Grammar’ section:
