Discovery Education

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Section Two

Discovery Education did a good job at building a strong and user-friendly website which incorporates a lot of educational material from different subjects and utilizing different tools and resources to further the education of students today. They went above and beyond to create more than just a website with educational information. They created an interface that meets the needs of students, teachers, and parents; offering more than just educational resources. The website is created and hosted by Discovery Communications, which also is responsible for the Discovery Network on television, and they have broadened their horizons stepping into the educational world, with an already existing background in the education of science and research. Their goal is to utilize their tools to bring success to education, and they have done so with their website. It is one thing to post educational resources on a website and become a database, but it is entirely another thing to go ahead and create your own educational network and move from being a reference to an actual resource. Discovery Communications entirely sponsors Discovery Education, and they began as an entertainment network for educational and informative programming with different offerings on television, before they branched out to specifically create an educational website.

One of the remarkable factors of this website is current both the information and the resources are. Discovery has mentioned in their mission, as well has proven with their resources, that they strive to remain current with regular updates to their technology, their website material, and their postings. The website not only updates their resources and their informational posts, both in the blog and up on their main site, on a daily basis, but they work to keep their educational tools such as their Techbook and their homework help tools as up to date as possible with the most current curriculum information. For example, they have introduced an entirely new section in their teaching curriculum for the common core education standard, which is a recent and entirely new way of teaching in the K-12 field. Additionally, when exploring their “Virtual Field Trip” they keep that section very up to date with different locations while providing key information in order to offer a more worldly educational experience.

Overall, Discovery has done an exemplary job at maintaining an organized, up to date, and easy to use website. The interface is very simple with everything accessible with just a few clicks and drop down menus. The use of media on their home page is also appealing and really draws in the user, offering them more of an entertaining educational experience. Education does not have to be boring and the resources do not have to be archaic, using the bare minimums of black and white ink on some paper; and Discovery Education has proved that. They have incorporated media and technology, and have used the interface of their website as more than just an educational resource. They have dived into the educational world, creating their own tools and resources in addition to providing educational references. In short, the website is well labeled making it easy to navigate and user friendly, which does not discourage anyone from trying to use the website, as well as it is engaging and interactive, making it a great resource for teachers and students, and even parents.

Research

As far as research goes, I would like to explore the topic of incorporating technology into the classroom and whether or not it would benefit the education of students. For my research investigation, the question I have formulated from my problem is: Does utilizing technological tool rather than just reading and writing out of a textbook help to enhance students educational experiences. The way this experiment is incorporated with the website is the students in the control group using the digital textbook would be using the Discovery Techbook and the resources associated with that. My subjects would be students in grades 6-12, both male and female. I chose this age specifically because at this age I feel that students are proficient with technology and can utilize it independently, allowing more accuracy to the experiment itself. In order to gather the data for this investigation, conducting surveys from a control and experimental group, one being taught the material with only a textbook and a notebook, and one being taught the same material through online resources such as interactive digital textbooks and end of lesson assessments, to see which group better learned and retained the information presented. Once the experiment is complete and it comes down to interpreting the data, the data interpreted would be both quantitative and qualitative. The qualitative data would include interpreting the responses to gauge not only whether the students felt that they learned the information adequately but how well they were able to learn and retain the information in their lesson, and then compare between the group who used technology and the group who was using textbooks. Then, the quantitative data would be measured by looking at the numerical grades of the assessments for the lesson and using those grades to conclude which group learned the information better by who scored better on the assessment. I think utilizing this information in the classroom could help to improve classroom practice because educators can gauge whether or not their traditional methods of teaching out of the textbook and students reading to study is still an effective means of teaching, or with the advancement of technology, are there new and more efficient ways to teach students the same information, and they may be more beneficial to the student. Education nowadays is and needs to continue to be centered around student success, and this experiment could prove that there are better ways for students to achieve their maximum potential for success.

Theory

The Discovery Education website most closely parallels with the ideas of the cognitive theoretical approach. Cognitive learning has a great deal to do with the internal understanding and retention of information, and how the student processes that information. With much of the Discovery Education website being based on resources for teaching and educational enrichment, congitivism does hold the greatest influence over the ideals of the website and the purpose of their resources. The first component of the website that represents the cognitive theory is the Discovery Education Techbook. While the main feature of the Techbook is an educational resource to replace obsolete paper textbooks, the digital learning resource also offers a plethora

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