The Discovery Education website offers a tremendous variety of high quality videos, digital textbooks, sample lesson plans, quizzes, warm-ups, brain teasers and explorations. This website is an excellent resource to utilize in order to engage students in scientific concepts that might otherwise seem foreign and irrelevant. Discovery Education aims to make curriculum more accessible to students and offers innovative strategies to teachers to improve student achievement. Not only does this website provide free resources to teachers, there are also resources to students and parents.
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Making Science Real
Discovery Education provides several interactive lesson plans that are a great way to help teachers connect the complex science pedagogy to students' everyday experiences. This can help students incorporate their own background knowledge with the curriculum (Dewey), so that they remain engaged and excited about what they learn.
Inquiry The Science Curriculum Center on Discovery Education provides quizzes, project ideas, experiments and fun facts to aid teachers as they try to make their curriculum more accessible to students. This resource is great for science educators that are trying to incorporate more inquiry-based activities into their lessons. Although many of the resources provided on this website are creative and engaging, the educator's role cannot be underestimated. Many of these activities may need to be differentiated for students that are learning at higher levels. For the most part, Discovery Education is a fantastic resource for teachers that want to find ways to engage the entire classroom. |
Become a Scientist Discovery education allows classes to view footage of animals as if they are their class pets. These videos can help students practice making careful, detailed observations while also encouraging social learning (Vygotsky). When using these live video feeds, it will be crucial to provide adequate scaffolding to students so that they are able to use these videos as observational tools to enhance their development as scientists. It would be beneficial for teachers to direct pre-lab reports and to facilitate class wide discussions to establish objectives and goals for the assignment. |