After their initial introduction to the Streaming Plus service, teachers were further trained by Crilley and Discovery Ed’s professional development program on how to use the Techbooks and Streaming Plus service to further enhance their students’ learning experiences.
“Once we had the opportunity to implement the Techbooks and the Streaming, when we started implementing some of our professional development, that’s when we started to see a shift occur with the teachers,” says Rexrode. “The biggest challenge is the learning curve that differentiates professional development. Often people feel that every teacher enters in for their own learning at the same level but very similar to students, they all come to it with very different levels of comfort and background knowledge. In the beginning we had several teachers who were out of their comfort zones and needed a little bit more personalized instruction.”
Once teachers became familiar with the technology and understood how to use it to improve instruction and students’ interest in content, they were able to create lessons that provided students with unique and engaging learning experiences.
“The technology is a total game changer in education. With the Streaming Plus you have videos where students can learn from someone other than their teacher or learn from a different perspective,” says Crilley. “It can take them places they wouldn’t normally get to travel to. We have a lot of teachers take advantage of the virtual field trips Discovery Education offers and that really takes them out of their classroom and into a world where they can experience things they wouldn’t get to on a normal basis.”
Furthermore, the Streaming Plus service allows for personalized instruction for students, where teachers can choose from a variety of videos for each student based on their interests, what they want to learn, and how they want to learn it.
“In math, we have students at all levels. We can choose a math video based on the topic and assign them to kids that need it,” says Crilley. “You may have a group of five students working on one topic, where another group of five is working on a different topic and because those videos are right there in Discovery Ed, you just assign them quickly and students don’t realize they’re doing different things. They’re getting what they need based on the data to help them grow academically.”
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