Explore ways to search and filter results in Discovery Education to identify the best resources for you, then scan results to see whether those resources are what you need.
There are tens of thousands of resources in Discovery Education. That’s a lot, especially if you’re searching for that one specific thing about … bones.
I’ve selected bones for a biology assignment about vertebrates.
In this overview, we’ll use bones as the fascinating thing you want to research and show you how to find specific information by narrowing down your search.
Searching for Resources
Let’s take a look at the various ways to use filters in Discovery Education to narrow search results and make it possible to identify your best resources. Then, let’s look at ways to scan results to see whether those resources are what you need. Pick a topic that you want to research. Go to the Search bar and type “bones” into the box. Hit return to see how many results you get. If you get just a few results, you might want to look at them all. If you get dozens, hundreds, or thousands of results, you should probably narrow them down.
My search for bones returned a lot of results!
Filtering Results
Sometimes the number of search result returns can be overwhelming. You can narrow your results in several ways. Try using a synonym or a more specific word for the Keyword.
I typed skeleton into the search bar and got 695 results. I typed spine into the search bar and got 186 results. I typed vertebrae into the search bar and got 83 results.
Specify a grade level. Click a grade band at the top of the screen, just under the grey bar, to bring up results that apply to those grades.
For vertebrae, I checked 6-8 as my grade band and got 25 results.
Look for a specific media type.
For vertebrae, I selected videos and got 12 results. For vertebrae, I selected text and got 6 results.
Evaluating Resources
When you’ve found a resource that you think you might want to use, take a quick look before you watch the whole thing or save it to your QuickList or My Content folder. Skimming a digital resource is very similar to skimming text.
- If the resource is text, skim it as you usually would, by looking for headers, words in bold, or reading the introductory sentences in all the paragraphs.
- If the resource is a video, fast forward to various sections to see if it seems to fit your needs or take a look at the transcript that comes with most videos to see if the narration provides the information you need. If the video has a transcript, you can find it by clicking on the Transcript tab on the video page. Then you can search the transcript for specific words and jump to them in the video.
I searched the Skeletons video transcript for the word vertebrae. It’s at 3:12 in the video. I searched the Skeletons video transcript for the word brain. It’s at 2:19 in the video.
With all of your options on the Search results screen and in Advanced Search, finding just what you need should be fun and simple with Discovery Education filters.
Interested in sharing this information with your students? Share this Studio Board (Canadian Subscribers) to guide their research. [This requires a Discovery Education login.]