Product Review of Discovery Education

Discovery Education is a big player in EdTech. The company has established itself as the leading provider of digital curriculum resources, digital content, and professional development for K-12 classrooms. Around 5.6 million learners across all 50 states and Canada are currently using Discovery Education. Discovery Education Streaming Plus, the comprehensive digital service supplementing instruction across all K-12 curricular areas, was recently the winner of the EdTech Digest’s Cool Tool Award in the Content Provider Solution category. Discovery Education Streaming Plus supplements instruction materials for all K–12 curricular areas. The supplemental materials include lesson plans, instructional strategies, and other content. Every possible source of content is available to learners including primary source documents, books, tapes, audio files, videos, podcasts, interviews, images, and more.
Website: https://www.discoveryeducation.com/
What Users Love About the App
“I love how easy it is to search for what you need. There are many options to explore a variety of topics, and there is something suitable for every grade level. The amount and variety of resources make it easy to differentiate for your students. There are also many options for students to interact with content and share their learning.”
“I’m a teacher and I have utilized this program to show educational videos to my students! They are informative and highly engaging for my young learners.”
“Discovery Education offers a ton of science lesson plans, activities, and resources for elementary teachers. The content is standards-based and easy to integrate into any classroom.”
“I like using Discovery Ed as a research tool for the students. I can find and assign videos for students to view as they take notes on topics we are learning.”
“I love that it matches the content to standards for me. It’s easier to find resources. My kids really enjoy the videos, they keep them engaged. I also like that many of the videos have guides to go along with them. It’s helpful to keep the kids engaged, and it gives me a source of questions to ask them. It makes my life as a teacher easier. It’s helpful to have videos that my district won’t block and that I know are safe for my students to view.”
“I love the interactive labs and experiments that students can use. In those interactives, they do a really good job graphing the student data based on the virtual experiment outcomes.”
What Users Dislike About the App
“I would like to have other subjects available, such as English Language Arts. As of now, materials are offered for Math, Science, Technology, and Social Studies.”
“Some content is a bit outdated, especially in the subjects of the arts and humanities. In addition, I am unsure when new content is added in my area. I wish that there was an option to receive a notification when new content is available in a specific subject or grade.”
“Not a fan of the reading assignments. There usually aren’t questions to go along with, so I ended up having to create those. It would be nice if there were more reading assignments with canned questions.”
“Unfortunately, the national science standards used don’t always match our Mississippi state standards, but there are still plenty of resources that can be adapted.”
“Some of the videos are very dated and it would be nice if more updated/new ones would be added.”
“I would like to see the Techbooks available for more age ranges, especially for math content in elementary grades. I would also like to see more online interactives.”