Over the past academic year I have been working with the University of South Florida Library to facilitate access to Discovery Education Streaming for students and faculty in the College of Education. Discovery Education streaming is a digital video-on-demand and online teaching service that is aligned to United States K-12 educational state standards. This digital resource provides preservice and inservice teachers with the tools to seamlessly incorporate fresh, vibrant digital media into student learning environments.
I have been using Discovery Education streaming in my undergraduate and graduate social studies methods courses. The students have accessed Discovery Education streaming's rich collection of more than 50,000 video segments from among 5,000 full-length educational videos from Discovery School and other award-winning producers. Over 1,000 new titles are added every year. USF College of Education students have found that the resource is easy to use and highly searchable by curriculum standard, keyword, subject area, or grade. Over 90% of the students in my course opted to incorporate resources from Discovery Education streaming into their lessons, and their feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
One student was developing a lesson about Amelia Earhart and located rare archival footage that was segmented into manageable instructional components. The use of this primary source gave students a visual representation of this groundbreaking aviator and helped the lesson "come alive" for the students. Many of my students went on to use Discovery Education streaming in other content methods courses such as science and math and subsequently accessed this valuable resource during their final internship placement in local schools.
Given this experience, I highly recommend that you explore Discovery Education streaming so that this quality resource can be accessed by the students and faculty in our teacher education programs. This is becoming a standard technological tool that many colleges of education and school districts are adopting for use by students and faculty in their instruction and planning. For information about the collection click here. For Content Overview see http://www.discoveryeducation.com/pdf/DEstreaming_ContentOverview.pdf.
For more information on setting up accounts for yourself or your students, please contact Dr. Berson at: berson@coedu.usf.edu Web: http://www.coedu.usf.edu/main/departments/seced/Faculty/Berson.html
