Twig science - outstanding videos for science lessons

Twig Science has just reached the end of its first year online and has already won a 2012 British Education Teaching Technology (BETT) award. With credentials like that, it seems like an appropriate time for webwatch to see what all the fuss is about. 

Twig is a swish new website chock-full of science videos. The films are visually beautiful; transporting pupils directly inside the xylem of a plant, or onto the head of a match, as it's struck in slow motion and begins its combustion reaction. Twig is also very well conceived; the clever thing being that the videos they produce are short and snappy. That means they don't take over a whole lesson and as a result they're eminently useable. Neither do they take up much lesson preparation time. You don't need to trawl through archives of VHS tapes to find clips showing what goes on at a metal extraction plant. Twig have done all that for you (and spiced it up a little too, thank goodness).