Discovery Education is a leading provider of digital curriculum resources, virtual learning opportunities, and professional development for K-12 classrooms. Founded in 2007 following the acquisition and merger of Discovery Communications’ multiple digital education businesses, Discovery Education aims to transform teaching and learning by creating engaging digital content and professional learning services.
Headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland and serving over 5 million educators and 50 million students worldwide, Discovery Education partners with school districts to empower teachers with digital resources to enhance their curriculum. Through its award-winning digital services, multimedia streaming platform, and robust library of curriculum resources, Discovery Education seeks to make classrooms more dynamic, increase student engagement and achievement, and expand opportunities for learning in and out of the classroom.
Discovery Education was established in 2007, bringing together previous Discovery digital education brands such as Discovery School, Discovery Streaming, United Streaming, and more. By combining Discovery’s strong brand and expertise in visual storytelling with new investments and innovations in digital education, Discovery Education positioned itself as an early leader in the digital learning space. Over the past 15 years, Discovery Education has continued building innovative classroom resources and working with school partners to reimagine teaching and learning with technology.
Digital Textbooks and Curriculum
Discovery Education offers a comprehensive suite of K-12 digital textbooks and curriculum designed to enhance learning and meet educational standards.
eTextbooks for K-12
Discovery Education partners with major textbook publishers to provide online versions of popular textbooks across core subjects. These interactive eTextbooks contain videos, virtual labs, review games and more to bring content to life. They can be accessed on any device and allow features like highlighting, note taking and embedded glossaries. Using eTextbooks helps schools lower textbook costs while providing engaging materials.
Ready-Made Curriculum and Lesson Plans
Discovery Education curates thousands of standards-aligned teaching resources, lesson plans, and full units of study. Their ready-made curriculum covers diverse topics and is designed by expert teachers to facilitate engaging instruction. Educators can choose to use Discovery Education’s full curriculum or supplement it with individual activities and media. The materials are customizable to meet different learning needs.
Formative Assessment Tools
A suite of formative assessment tools allows teachers to gauge student understanding and tailor instruction. Quick diagnostic assessments, exit tickets, pacing guides, and regular benchmark assessments help teachers monitor progress and growth. The platform provides detailed reporting and analysis on assessments to inform teaching practices.
Virtual Field Trips
Discovery Education’s library of Virtual Field Trips allows students to experience immersive and interactive video tours of locations they normally wouldn’t be able to visit. These experiences bring learning to life by taking students to places like the Galapagos Islands, Antarctica, Mars, the Cincinnati Zoo, and more without leaving the classroom.
The virtual trips use 360 degree video and interactive features to make students feel like they are really there. Students can navigate through different angles and hotspots during the trip to get up close with wildlife, explore landscapes or cityscapes, see inside famous locations, and interact with guides. Virtual reality goggles can take the experience one step further.
Discovery Education partners with organizations like NASA, zoos, aquariums, museums, and notable historic sites to create custom virtual tours aligned to curriculum standards across subjects. Trips are led by knowledgeable tour guides and include supporting materials for teachers like discussion questions, activities, career profiles and more.
Virtual field trips spark curiosity, foster engagement and make learning fun. They allow every student to have equal access to places they may not otherwise get to experience. The immersive videos bring abstract concepts to life, reinforce lessons, and create lasting educational memories without leaving the classroom.
STEM Resources
Discovery Education offers a wealth of STEM resources to engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math. These interactive tools make STEM subjects come alive and provide real-world connections.
Coding Platform and Challenges
Discovery Education’s coding platform allows students to learn coding skills through interactive challenges, games, and visualization exercises. Students can learn block coding, HTML, JavaScript, and other languages. The platform features hundreds of coding challenges ranked by difficulty, so students can progress through beginner to advanced skills. Challenges focus on topics like algorithms, cryptography, cybersecurity, and more. Teachers can track student progress through the coding curriculum.
STEM Careers Database
Discovery Education helps introduce students to STEM careers through its database of over 850 job profiles. Students can explore jobs in healthcare, energy, transportation, computing, engineering, and other high-growth industries. Each profile outlines daily responsibilities, education requirements, average salary, and helpful interview advice. The database allows students to filter roles by interests like “working with people” or “solving problems.” This makes it easy for students to find jobs that fit their skills and passions.
Science and Math Interactive Content
Discovery Education offers multimedia science and math content to explain complex concepts through multiple modalities. Interactive models allow students to manipulate variables and run virtual experiments. Math games provide engaging practice on foundational skills and real-world applications. Video collections feature scientist interviews, lab footage, and on-location reporting to showcase STEM professionals in action. These resources provide an immersive way for students to build science and math literacy. The content is designed to spark curiosity and highlight the relevance of STEM topics to students’ lives.
Professional Development
Discovery Education offers a wide range of professional development opportunities for educators to support their continuous learning. This allows teachers to stay up-to-date on the latest pedagogical strategies and educational technologies to engage students.
Training Courses and Workshops
Discovery Education provides training courses and multi-day workshops facilitated by expert educators. These intensive sessions allow teachers to explore new teaching methods and best practices on topics like differentiated instruction, STEM education, social-emotional learning, and more. Courses feature hands-on activities, lesson planning support, and collaboration with peers.
Certificate Programs
For a more in-depth professional development experience, Discovery Education offers certificate programs. These multi-course programs take place over several months and allow teachers to dive deep into high-demand topics. Teachers can earn a certificate in areas like digital leadership, competency-based education, social-emotional learning, and computational thinking.
On-Demand Webinars
Discovery Education hosts free and premium on-demand webinars covering diverse education topics. These recorded webinars allow teachers to learn on their own time about implementing standards, literacy strategies, assessment, and everything in between. Webinars feature education experts and allow self-paced learning.
Parent Resources
Discovery Education offers a variety of tools and resources to help parents support their children’s learning at home.
At-Home Learning Tools and Tips
Discovery Education Experience provides on-demand access to curriculum resources, virtual field trips, video lessons and more that parents can use at home with their kids. There are topic explorations, hands-on activities, puzzles and games tailored for different grade levels.
The Parent Portal gives parents visibility into their child’s work and progress. Parents can see assigned content, view grades and provide feedback.
Tips and advice articles on the Discovery Education blog offer ideas for hands-on STEM projects, advice for supporting reading skills at home, summer learning activities and more.
Communication Tools to Engage Parents
With Discovery Education Community, teachers can maintain class websites with homework assignments, class updates, calendars and more to keep parents informed.
Class Messenger and text messaging tools allow teachers to send announcements and reminders directly to parents.
Discussion boards within the platform let parents connect with teachers and other parents to share ideas and best practices for helping kids learn at home.
Virtual events like curriculum nights and parent-teacher conferences can be hosted remotely through the platform.
Discovery Education aims to provide parents with the insights and tools they need to reinforce classroom learning at home and stay actively engaged in their child’s education. The various communication features help strengthen the home-school connection.
Customizable Platform
Discovery Education offers a highly customizable platform that allows schools and districts to tailor the experience to their specific needs. The flexible architecture and robust admin controls give educators the power to modify Discovery Education to work ideally in diverse learning environments.
Administrators can configure class rostering, single sign-on integration, content level settings, and more from a central admin console. They can choose to make only collector content or custom district content available to their users. Granular permissions allow control over who can access, create, edit, share, and assign content and assessments.
At the classroom level, teachers can create customized assignments, quizzes, and lessons that leverage Discovery Education’s library of standards-aligned resources. They can build private portfolios of curriculum resources, save lesson plans, and collect digital content specific to each student. The platform seamlessly integrates with Google and Microsoft tools commonly used in schools.
For students, the experience is also highly personalized. Their dashboard can be tailored to display only the content their teacher assigns. Text size, color contrast, and text-to-speech capabilities provide accessibility and academic support. Student work can be made available to parents and guardians through the platform’s communication tools.
With its flexible architecture and extensive configuration options, Discovery Education gives districts an adaptable edtech platform that works for any environment and learning style. Administrators maintain oversight while educators and students get tools focused entirely on their needs.
Conclusion
Overall, Discovery Education provides educational solutions for K-12 classrooms and schools. Their mission is to make a lasting difference by inspiring learning, and providing engaging content to students across America and beyond.
Some of Discovery Education’s key services and offerings include:
Digital textbooks and standards-aligned curriculum resources across core subjects like math, science, ELA, and social studies. This allows teachers to incorporate interactive and multimedia learning.
An expansive library of engaging virtual field trips and videos to supplement instruction. Students can virtually explore places around the world.
Robust STEM resources like the Discovery Education Experience promote critical thinking and problem-solving skills through hands-on exploration.
Professional development for teachers to support technology integration, instructional strategies, leadership, and more. This allows educators to continuously improve.
Parent resources and family engagement tools to extend learning outside of school.
Data analytics on student progress inform teaching and personalized instruction.
In summary, Discovery Education aims to transform classrooms and schools with digital learning tools, expert-curated content, and professional support. Their comprehensive platform engages students, empowers educators, and improves academic achievement.