A re-introduction to Discovery Education streaming

For quite some time now, unitedstreaming has been the only game in town for access to high quality educational video. While not quite true, there are other games, none can compete with the number of available resources that the newly renamed Discovery Education streaming contains. According to their web site, they have “4,000 full-length videos segmented into 40,000 content-specific clips.” 40,000 clips?! And actually there’s more if you throw in what their premium service, Discovery Education streaming Plus, includes.

Today we hosted around 25 educators from around the county to give them somewhat of a refresher on how to use Discovery Education streaming. Besides Dennis and I, we were fortunate to have Jason Buntain from Discovery Education with us to lend his first-hand expertise. Many of the participants were new to streaming video from Discovery Education, so they were happy to have some introductory activities.

Michigan has such a great price for Discovery Education streaming ($440 per building) that it’s hard not to pass up using this great tool. Of particular interest to teachers should be the ability to create assignments for students in which students can watch full videos or video clips on an online lesson page that they can view from anywhere (home, library, computer lab, Borders…). Wow! We know that kids these days are connected, so it’s easy to expect that they can watch video segments and use them to complete further activities.  What a great way to extend the classroom beyond the regular school day.