Discovery Ed Adds New Tools and Content to Learning Platform

Discovery Education has released an update to its K–12 learning platform, offering a range of new features, tools and integration with other technologies.

Among the updates is an improved Studio Tool, which allows teacher and students to create their own content. The update includes research-based activity templates, real-time collaboration, student presentation boards and slideshows and an embedded Microsoft Immersive Reader. Studio also includes some 1,500 ready-made activities that can be customized or used as-is.

The platform also adds a new interactive quiz tool, which offers video-based quizzes, traditional quizzes (multiple choice, open-ended, etc.) and a Live Quiz tool for asking questions through online meeting platforms like Teams and Zoom. According to Discovery Ed: "In all modes, Quiz results display in real-time, empowering educators to gauge participation and correct responses, offer just-in-time feedback, and identify remediation needs."

Other new features include:

  • A redesigned UI;

  • An updated video player, offering the ability to assign videos to students directly, create video quizzes, use embedded language and accessibility options and find supporting content to go along with the video;

  • Support for using QR codes to log in;

  • Improved integration and interoperability with Canvas, Schoology, D2L, Infinite Campus, Google technologies and Microsoft Teams.

“Integrating all the ed tech resources stood-up to maintain the continuity of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is a major challenge facing school leaders,” said Discovery Education CEO Scott Kinney in a prepared statement. “The new features and enhancements we are announcing today help solve that challenge. The improved functionality of our flagship K-12 platform puts all the tools needed to engage students with digital content at educators’ fingertips and the work to boost our service’s ability to easily dovetail into school systems’ IT infrastructure makes it simple to merge our content and resources into the learning environments school systems already have in place. Taken together, these features and enhancements will help school systems improve the return on the edtech investment they made over the past year.”

The new version is available now. Further details can be found on Discovery's site.

About the Author

David Nagel is the former editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group and editor-in-chief of THE Journal, STEAM Universe, and Spaces4Learning. A 30-year publishing veteran, Nagel has led or contributed to dozens of technology, art, marketing, media, and business publications.

He can be reached at [email protected]. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrnagel/ .


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