Take all of the great educational videos you can find and put them in one place, cataloged and organized in various ways so it is easy to find exactly what you need for whatever grade level you are teaching. Add video clips, a tool for creating quizzes, and lesson planning. Provide all this through one subscription service so that everything is accessible on demand, right when you need it. That’s what you get with Discovery Education® streaming™.
Discovery Education® streaming™ offers different types of subscriptions. The Plus option gives you access to everything with at least 9,500 complete videos and 77,000 video clips. Videos are from sources such as BBC, Discovery Channel, Scholastic, and NEST. The NEST Animated Heroes Classics alone would cost you far more than the price of your subscription! The Plus option has videos for preschool through adult level although they identify them only for kindergarten through twelfth grade. Resources primarily address science, history, math, language arts, health, and technology, but I also spotted resources such as elementary Spanish, preschool readiness, character building, and world religions.
Everything is catalogued and indexed so that you can search in various ways with multiple criteria. You can even see how a resource satisfies national standards. Parents can create lesson plans, assignments, and quizzes, then get automated email notification when a student completes an assignment. The lesson planning and assignment tools are helpful, but you can simply log in and select something on the spur of the moment if need be.
There is so much there that you can find something on just about any topic presented at a selected grade level. For example, I searched for video segments on “Archimedes” for middle elementary grades and came up with a number of entertaining segments that would be useful for understanding his theory of displacement.
Among the videos you can access are those from series such as the Standard Deviants, NEST (Animated Stories from the Bible and Animated Hero Classics), American Experience, Slim Goodbody, Inquiring Minds, Lollipop Dragon, Math Factor, Meet the Music Makers, Rabbit Ears Children’s Literature Collection, Science Investigations, Teaching through Technology, Elementary Spanish, Discovering Math, Discovering Fine Arts, and Art Tango.
Discovery Education Science and Discovery Education Health are separate subscriptions that are more narrowly focused. Each of these subscriptions has more content in each subject area than is contained in the Plus subscription. I did not review these but I noted that access to Discovery Education Techbooks that are included with the Science subscription provides course content in digital format. Interactive learning activities also make science come alive for students.
