Vicki Cobb is a very successful author of children’s books and is active in promoting children’s interest in reading and in science.
She writes here about a wonderful FREE resource for children.
No catch.
Wonderful reading online at no cost.
She begins (open the link to read it all!):
In my recent post Why Education Should Always Be Nonprofit I examined some opportunities for corruption. First, in the building of fortunes, like oil, but also in the establishment of for-profit schools where money is siphoned off by realtors and administrators. The product of education is not a commodity that generates enormous wealth, like oil, but a human being who is capable of contributing to society. So where’s the payoff for the individual for-profit investor in the school? It’s certainly not in the production of educated individuals. Society at large benefits from that investment.
So I started a nonprofit organization to bring the work of the most talented children’s nonfiction authors to the classroom. To that end, in 2014 we started publishing the Nonfiction Minute, a FREE daily posting of 400-word essays by top children’s nonfiction authors. An audio file accompanies each Minute so that the more challenged readers have access to our content. Millions of page-views later, we caught the eye of Paul Langhorst, the executive of SchoolTube. And today, we have something new to celebrate: We are launching The Nonfiction Minute Channel on School Tube. Each post is the audio file of the author reading his/her Minute and is illustrated with art in a slide show. Paul Langhorst, told me that teachers have been asking for more on quality reading and writing, so here we are. There are links on the School Tube post to the Nonfiction Minute archives so students can read the text of the Nonfiction Minutes if they are so inclined.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Our guide was quick to answer: “John D. Rockefeller Senior committed no crimes because there were no laws restricting the ways he amassed his fortune….”
Exactly the mentality that allowed those directly responsible for the 2007-2008 economic crash that devastated the lives of millions to walk away scott-free. They didn’t do anything illegal, because all of their obscenely immoral acts were made legal by a compliant Congress, regardless of the resulting destruction. Nauseating.
What a wonderful collection! Thank you, Ms. Cobb, for your insightful editing and for making this material available. And thanks, Diane, for posting this. Such a joy. Delightful!!! Literally. Full of delights.
https://www.nonfictionminute.org/minutes-to-browse.html
AS always read the information at the website.
If you want ad-free content, you pay a fee.
Fees are low, and they are different for an individual versus a school.
There is no doubt this is valuable and it is COPPA compliant. Even so, it is not ad-free unless you pay a fee.
https://superview.schooltube.com/ad-free-info/
“No catch.
Wonderful reading online at no cost.”
Oh, there is a catch. . .
. . . it’s in the second line!
The Nonfiction Minute doesn’t have a catch. It is free and doesn’t charge for advertising. My choice. So who supports our endeavor? Our authors contribute dues that just about cover the website fees.. We take a 10% booking fee for Authors on Call, who give their interactive programs to classrooms via videoconferencing. They are paid at a rate much lower than in-person school visits. (Well-paying, in-person school visits are down for all but a few authors.) All of the work to create the Minutes is done pro bono. The editing is done pro bono by Jean Reynolds, one of the best editors in the children’s book world. The daily work and the running of iNK is done by me and a few others at no pay. For 10 years! Diane writes her blog pro bono since 2012. .
We have tried crowd-sourcing fund raisers, writing grants, and are now seeing if we get funding through the Benevity platform. When Paul Langhorst told me that he’d pay us 30% for our channel, this is much more than other platforms. It gives us a revenue trickle, not a stream. Our print publishers are suffering financially. Authors can’t make a reasonable livelihood from their writing.
So the Nonfiction Minute is free. No catch. The SchoolTube Channel offers a way to get it ad fee. So ads are a catch. Should I have turned it down? Do you wanna make a contribution to iNK? If so, there’s a button buried somewhere on our website.
Vicki. Thanks for follow up and details on funding.
I think I am not alone in habitually looking at online resources with an eye open to “terms of service” and who is financing the resources.
I am tapped out on donations this year. I hope you thrive and can expand your inventory. I know three librarians who need to know about this resource. I will make sure they are informed.
I forwarded a link to this site to friends and family with kids. It’s wonderful. Thanks, again, Ms. Cobb, for this great resource!
The Nonfiction Minute is totally FREE – five short 400-word pieces on all sorts of fun subjects are posted every week. In addition there is an audio recording by the author reading it, and a few visuals, like illustrations, maps, photos. Here’s the website: https://www.nonfictionminute.org/ SchoolTube (which carries some of the NfMinute content in podcasts) is a subscription service. Epic! also carries some of the audio NFMinute content and is free to teachers or librarians, but a subscription to parents. BUT, the Nonfiction Minute is totally free.
Thanks be to all the gods, past, present, and future, for children’s authors:
Love me some Seuss.
O, he is the juice!
He’s never abstruse
or roundly obtuse.
His rhymes, they produce
A feeling footloose.
He calls out abuse,
says there’s no excuse
for racists as dense
as a Pence or a moose.
I love to Watusi
to Bach and Debussy
and stand on my head
and romp in my bed,
but nothing will float
my stupendious boat
or get better use
than a book by Pere Seuss!