Ever since its debut as United Streaming more than 20 years ago, Discovery Education’s learning platform has been known for its expansive treasury of digital resources, which now includes more than 200,000 videos, text-based passages, interactives, audio, podcasts, and images that span all grades, subjects, and critical topics of today. Each month, Discovery Education adds hundreds of new resources—including ready-to-use activities, Virtual Field Trips, video from trusted partners, podcasts, and relevant, curated channels—to excite, engage, and connect students to the real world.
Now, the edtech company is building on its legacy as the leader in digital content by adding a host of new, time-saving features to its platform supporting teaching, creating, and professional growth. Among those enhancements are:
A new, interactive Quiz tool. The platform’s new Quiz tool provides multiple ways for teachers to promote active learning in the classroom and track student progress in real-time. Various Quiz types include:
· Ask Live Quiz. Through Live Quiz, teachers can now spark lively classroom discussions by asking students questions live through virtual meeting solutions, like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Teams
· Standard Quiz. With Standard Quiz, teachers can check for understanding and student readiness through a range of question formats, from polling to open-end and multiple-choice to image annotation.
· Video-Based Quiz. Video-Based Quiz combines video from Discovery Education’s rich vault of high-quality content and embedded questions on the video viewing timeline to create highly engaging interactive learning experiences.
In all modes, Quiz results display in real-time, empowering educators to gauge participation and correct responses, offer just-in-time feedback, and identify remediation needs.
Teacher and student-created activities and presentations are easier than ever with the improved Studio tool. Studio, Discovery Education’s latest collaboration and presentation tool, serves as educators’ creative outlet to imagine and practice new activities. As Studio and Discovery Education’s world-class content are part of a unified system, creating interactive and media-rich instructional activities just became even simpler and more straightforward than ever.
With Studio, educators can:
· Use new Activity Templates based on Discovery Education’s SOS Instructional Strategies — the creative, research-based instructional strategies created by teachers for teachers — to create lively presentations that engage students in daily instruction.
· Give students the opportunity to share their knowledge in creative ways through their own presentation boards and slideshows.
· Collaborate with students in real-time within the confines of a safe and secure environment no matter where the classroom is.
· Promote literacy, accessibility, and comprehension for all learners with the embedded Microsoft Immersive Reader Tool.
In addition, more than 1500 ready-to-use instructional activities for all subjects are available through the Discovery Education platform. Teachers can assign them to students as-is, edit and personalize these lessons within Studio, use the integrated Activity Builds to quickly build their own dynamic lessons, or start with a blank slate and create their own custom lessons from scratch.
Tighter integrations with Learning Management Systems. Deeper Learning Tools Interoperability with Canvas, Schoology, D2L, Infinite Campus improve the ability to quickly search for resources in the Discovery Education platform and share them through Learning Management Systems. In addition, the platform meshes easily with Google and Microsoft Team, making it simple to share resources with students in assignments, questions, announcements, and materials.
New ways to easily log in to the Discovery Education platform. Students can now use QR codes for quick student access, no matter their sign-in method or LMS. Administrators can bulk-issue these codes at the school level or teachers can issue them for their own classrooms. Educators and students can also do a search by school name or put in their username to allow all to log in from any location or preference.
A completely redesigned Video Player. The new Discovery Education video player not only matches the platform’s lighter, redesigned look and feel, but it also makes it easy for teachers to incorporate rich media into the learning experiences they design and deliver every day. From the new Video Player page, teachers can:
· Build interactive video quizzes or slideshow activities in a few simple steps.
· Assign videos directly to students and add context and instructions.
· Share videos with students and colleagues using a simple link.
· Reach all learners with embedded language and accessibility supports.
· Find supporting resources and content like images, interactives, and audio.
Together, these new features and enhancements support the creation of interactive learning experiences that spark curiosity, make classroom activities livelier and engaging, and provide the literacy and language supports that give every student the opportunity to have their “light bulb” moment.
“Integrating all the edtech resources stood-up to maintain the continuity of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is a major challenge facing school leaders,” says CEO Scott Kinney. “The new features and enhancements we are announcing today help solve that challenge. The improved functionality of our flagship K-12 platform puts all the tools needed to engage students with digital content at educators’ fingertips and the work to boost our service’s ability to easily dovetail into school systems’ IT infrastructure makes it simple to merge our content and resources into the learning environments school systems already have in place. Taken together, these features and enhancements will help school systems improve the return on the edtech investment they made over the past year.” Learn more.
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