Accessing New Content Through Active Learning 

I always want my students to be held accountable for their learning and ensure they aren’t just clicking through content. Outside of school hours, there’s no shortage of passive experiences for our kids, so when they enter the classroom, I want to ensure they are actively learning. Discovery Education resources do a great job of making learning interesting and requiring active participation throughout the entire lesson.

In Discovery Education Experience, there are great videos, but the best part is that there are also questions, graphic organizers, or activities embedded into the videos that will hold students accountable for the learning. These strategies and activities are what take the content to the next level for my students—they help students gather new information from something as short as a 2-minute video or go back and review a video if they miss something. Just as much as we want students to cite evidence from a text, they also need to be able to cite evidence from other media – video is just a different text! I could go find a video on YouTube to share with my students to help them learn about the phases of weather, but the support from Discovery Education is what helps me know that my students are engaged in the learning and aren’t just passive participants. 

Part planning for critical thinking in the classroom is analyzing the rigor of the activity students are completing alongside a piece of content. DE helps create experiences that ask students to move past recalling knowledge and toward thinking of the implications of a concept, idea, or piece of information.