4 Ways to Use Discovery Education Board Builder

Did you know that if your district adopted Discovery Education resources, your students can create boards on DE Streaming that give students a chance to make what is akin to webpages? Students have a unique login and are already synced up to your teacher account making it really easy for students to create their boards and then share those boards with you. No printing out or submitting to an electronic dropbox needed. Students think it is pretty neat to be able to customize the page, embed video and pictures, and work with tools that are very similar to setting up a blog. This keeps them engaged as well as gives some good techy skills. So what is DE Streaming ideal for?

Revamping a Classic

Instead of doing a brochure/poster/PowerPoint project that has been done before, have students create DE Boards. Let's face it, by the time my students have reached me, they have made brochures for multiple subjects and PowerPoints galore. I was easily able to convert a career research brochure project into a DE Board by simply adding a multimedia component. Instead of pictures, students are able to use video segments as well.

Converting Boring Assignments to Engaging

Sample of Summary Board

I know that I can't make everything thrilling. Sometimes skill-building involves practicing a skill that is itself fairly boring. When it comes to a skill like summarization - something the kids have been working on for years - it can be a little "blah". Enter DE! After introducing a couple expository summarization skills in class, I had students apply them to video segments from DE. The videos definitely held their interest. They were studying space at the time, so students were able to research concepts from the unit that interested them. It was also a great way of me offering an extension to that leaning as students watched videos on concepts - like Space-Time - far beyond the required curriculum.

My Poetry Board

Publishing Work

The final stage of the writing process is publishing. Taping over 150 essays to a wall isn't really a viable or logical form of publishing. Having students convert their essays into DE pages (students could have 1 page and add to throughout the year or have a different page each essay) is a fun way of having the student feel like they really made something special. They can even press the print button, make it PDF, and post it to the class Edmodo or what have you. 

Creating Own Teacher Board

Create your own board for an interactive lesson complete with videos. You can also add documents, quizzes, and writing prompts.