Discovery Education helps differentiate instruction with multimodal digital content for multiple learning styles, degrees of readiness, and interests by offering resources to help vary content, process, product, and learning environment. Explore resources, strategies, and learning opportunities for effectively using Discovery Education to differentiate instruction.
Content
Searching for Resources
Discovery Education offers a wide variety of resources including videos, images, audiobooks, poetry, podcasts, songs, interactive activities, and reading passages. The high quality multimodal digital content, differentiation tools, and language support will bolster teaching and learning in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Multimodal resources provide multiple representations of the content, and educators can assign targeted content to whole groups or individual students. In addition to filtering all resources by grade band, reading level, teachers can also search by different languages in selecting appropriate resources to help develop background knowledge which will increase student motivation. | LEARN MORE ABOUT SEARCHING FOR RESOURCES.
Closed Caption and Transcripts
Discovery Education feature videos with closed caption and transcripts that provide additional language support for students. Closed caption and video transcript features provide an additional modality of print text when paired with a video’s visuals and audio. Closed captions are a powerful tool for students to fully understand key concepts, especially when dealing with technical subjects. Closed captions support students with word knowledge, information retention, content recall, nuanced language, and syntax. The settings for closed captions can be adjusted to modify text color, background color, and font size. Transcripts provide similar support as Closed Captioning, but are searchable for specific vocabulary. | LEARN MORE ABOUT CLOSED CAPTIONS AND TRANSCRIPTS.
Text Support
Because verbal skills develop more quickly than reading and writing skills, students may understand what is read aloud, even if they cannot read it themselves. All Discovery Education text resources include a read-aloud feature so that students can hear and understand the content. Settings can be adjusted to modify reading speed, highlight settings, font changes, and text mode settings. Additionally, additional tools such as a page mask and tracking ruler support students as they read. | LEARN MORE ABOUT TEXT FEATURES.
Audio Resources
The digital nature of content such as songs, and podcasts, provides additional opportunities for students to hear the content and can be interacted with multiple times to support language development. Many of Discovery Education’s audio resources include printed lyrics or speech transcripts to make the resource accessible to all students regardless of reading or language ability. | LEARN MORE ABOUT AUDIO RESOURCES.
Process
SOS Instructional Strategies
SOS Instructional Strategies provide instructional ideas that encourage students to engage in multimedia through meaningful use and interaction. Students are able to practice key skills such as summarizing, compare and contrast, citing evidence, questioning, and so much more when these strategies are combined with digital resources. Additional strategies also support vocabulary development by providing a scaffold for developing academic language. Teachers can select their instructional intent and find corresponding strategies to help vary the complexity, content modality, and the demonstration of learning. | EXPLORE THE SOS INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES (CANADIAN SUBSCRIBERS) OR GET STARTED WITH THE TOP 10 SOS FOR DIFFERENTIATION (CANADIAN SUBSCRIBERS).
Product
Studio
Discovery Education Studio provides students with a platform to demonstrate their understanding of a concept by integrating Discovery Education content as well as their own self-created content, like videos, images, oral text, and more. Teachers can record directions and upload it as a file to Studio so that language-learning students can more easily interact with the same content as their peers. Resources can be curated on a board to guide learning and boards can be differentiated to meet the needs of the student. Teachers can create assessments and assignments with different interactive item types and multimodal resources. Just like other resources, Studio Boards can be assigned to a whole class, group of students, or a single student. | LEARN MORE ABOUT STUDIO.