Discovery Education (Thing 30)

I really enjoyed exploring Discovery Education! I wasn't such a fan of some of the different ways I had to find materials, but I'm glad that the materials are there and that our district has a subscription to it. The quality of materials is overall higher than the quality of other comparable services and certainly better than what I would find by simply Googling key words for the lessons I'm teaching. I like the variety of articles, videos, and writing prompts, and I'm sure that I haven't even scratched the surface of what is there.

If I put in the time (and I'll have to!) I think I can organize the materials here into something that I can use. I started adding some content just to get the feel for how it worked, and I like the "QuickList" feature because you can just check the materials you like without having to worry about where it's being stored until later. Then, you can go back and organize the materials (that's the QuickList on the bottom bar). This feels a lot like when I first learned to use Google Drive (and I still lose stuff there!).

The video that I found in the "Streaming Plus" section was about Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and how it fit into the genre of science fiction. I looked for things that I could use literally on the first day of class and didn't find anything that set the right tone, but I think I could use this definitely in the first week of eighth grade. My students read a science fiction book of their choice during the summer between seventh and eighth grade, so I always start with science fiction for my first literary unit. 

I watched several videos before selecting this one; most of them have the same "packaged" quality that I don't particularly like in educational materials (for one thing, they seem a little condescending), but for the most part, the content was pretty good. I think my students could learn from these, and I like that they have examples from literature that I don't teach because it exposes the kids to more authors and texts. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a great book!

In the "Spotlight on Strategies" section, I chose the Six Word Story and Reading Between The Lines. I was intrigued by the Six Word Story because while I have had the students work with Six Word Memoirs before, I've never used it as a summarization technique. I like this strategy because it has good scaffolding in that it starts with images and then moves to short articles to summarize; it also has a sharing and comparing element at the end. 

These are the famous six words that supposedly started the whole "six word" movement:

https://www.tes.com/lessons/w3CmpJZmycWXeA/six-word-memoirs

I also stumbled across this website with more examples that are great.

The Reading Between The Lines was a little different than I thought it was going to be; I thought it was going to be more about inferring directly, but instead, the students are supposed to put the story or article into Wordle and then use their word cloud to see what are the main ideas. It's a neat idea and one that I would never would have thought of on my own! Plus, I love Wordle (except that it's apparently blocked on Chrome?).

For my final exploration on Discovery Education, I built a board that has resources about the different types of sentences. I tried for several minutes to get an embed code for the board, but I couldn't find one, so here is the link to the board. I agree with Emily that I don't like that you have to be logged in to view the board, but I guess that's what you get with a paid subscription service. Here are some screenshots too:

I like that there are a variety of materials built into the board, but again, I have to agree with Emily that I don't like that you can't use YouTube videos. I've come to rely on them through this course and in other areas of my teaching, but it just means that I'll need to watch more of the content on Discovery Education itself. I thought it was particularly cool that I could add documents right next to the videos and reminders; a small thing that I don't like is that you can't rename documents! Sometimes I name my documents weird things like "actual real copy of handout 45" and that helps me but not the kids.  :)

I don't think the board will be super helpful in my classroom because I already use Schoology to add videos and documents in content-specific folders - the board does look nicer, though, so maybe I'll try it. I think the easiest thing to incorporate will be strategies that I found since they're usable instantly and transferrable to several different lessons I can already think of. It's always good to learn about the resources we have in our district, though, because if they're available, I should use them!