Blog Challenge: Day 12 Favorite Website Discovery Education

Challenge: What is a website that you cannot live without? Tell about your favorite features and how you use it in your teaching and learning.

Another of my go-to websites is one that our county provides for all employees and students: Discovery Education. The site is well known for quality educational videos that span all grade levels and include a huge variety for all subject/content areas. But it is so much more!

Along with the videos that are available, Discovery provides primary source documents, images, audio files, articles, lesson plans, and more. All of these resources can be linked, used, and  incorporated with web 2.0 tools, various devices, and best practices.

The beauty is that our students have access to all of these materials. So imagine, students using the editable video clips from Discovery Education and creating a narrative that is first person. They can also pull images into say a VoiceThread and discuss and make comments to share what they have learned. Or they can even create a digital story using the images as well. There are speeches available that students could use and add visual images to create a movie about the speech. Use the transcript from the speeches and paste the dialogue into a word cloud (such as wordle) to analyze key points from the speech.

For the teachers, I absolutely love the builder tools! These tools provide a way for teachers to create assignments, writing prompts, quizzes, assessments, and digital boards for their classes. The builder tools also allow linking to external websites and even embedding web 2.0 tools all in one place for the students. For example, I created various ecosystem projects for the students using the writing prompt builder. I included resources from Discovery of course, but also linked out to kid friendly articles and embedded a Google Presentation as well as the Voicethread for the students. So once they signed in, they had all the materials they needed for the research and background for their project. I was able to differentiate the assignments as well.

The newest feature is the Board Builder which in the teacher tools as well as the student account. The Board Builder is a digital poster creator allowing the user to embed Discovery Education material, add text, and even upload videos, images, presentations, word documents, and more.

All in all, the investment that our county puts into Discovery Education is well worth it.