Re-Discover Discovery Education

There are already several articles in this blog that share ways to use our subscription to Discovery Education with students. Recently, however, Discovery Education has made several changes to its platform to make it relevant and user friendly for remote teaching and learning. They have also made some of their additional subscriptions free through the end of the school year.

If you have not been using Discovery Education with your students, or if you have not been there for a while, I would encourage you to take a quick look and see what is available. I have put together a list of links highlighting features of the site that might be helpful during our current situation.

• Getting Started Guide to Virtual Learning -This guide will teach you how to search, save, and share content with your students. Do you use Google Classroom? Then be sure to watch step 3. Looking for a way to make virtual learning collaborative? Then check out the Step 4 Video.
• Viruses and Outbreaks -This is an up-to-date resource for peer-reviewed content about the pandemic and more. Notice you can quickly sort the content by grade level, and that many of the resources are also available in Spanish.
• Virtual Fieldtrips – Almost as good as being there! Discovery has a vast collection of virtual field trips to places around the world.
• Coding – An example of content that is not usually free. Discovery has an interactive block coding curriculum available to students.
• News and Current Events– Updated every two days! This short video segment is usually hosted by young people from around the world with more of a global focus than most US news reports.

Access and Accessibility

To access Discovery Education, current Bend-La Pine teachers can start from the staff portal or go to: www.bls.discoveryeducation.com. Students automatically have Discovery Education on their student iPads. They need only to log in with their regular user name and password.

Most of Discovery Educations resources are also available in Spanish. Students can also turn on the closed caption feature for many video resources for reference, or for translation to their native language.