Thing 30: Discovery Ed

I've heard of Discovery Ed before, but only from seeing it on the institute day option list and from talking with people from the Social Studies department.  Its another avenue to explore as you look for various aides for your classroom.

The first thing I looked for was something in Physical Education.  I was surprised by the amount of content they actually had.  There are days when we are rained out, and don't have a 4th teaching spot to use, so this could be a great option for us.  The video I found was about competitive sports in general for kids at the middle school level.  It was about breaking down some barriers that are out there (body image issues, gender roles, etc.)  It was short enough to possible show at the start of the school year.  Watch the video here.  There were also some other topics, including drug and alcohol awareness and anaerobic steroid use.  These are other topics we cover throughout the year.

The Spotlight on Strategies section was pretty cool.  It grouped together a bunch of different resources into specific topics, such as assessment, research, and sequencing.  The cool part of this section is that actual teachers have done these lessons and know what works and what doesn't.  I didn't see anything that pertained to my field specifically, so I looked into some areas about citing sources.  The video talked about related the popular show "Myth Busters" into an activity in which kids would learn how to tell if something they found on the internet was real, or possibly a myth.  It was a good idea on how to teach kids not to hold everything they find online to be the truth.

The Board Builder was a cool idea.  It is almost like creating a small website for a single activity.  I created a short lesson base for advisory.  In 7th grade we examine friendship.  I put together a video clip on friendship, as well as a short written document, then added a few guided questions for kids to work together with in small groups.

Discovery Ed seems like it has a lot of quality resources, but would take a lot more time to go through to see what we could actually use.  I will definitely remember this site for rainy days!