Marybeth O’Brien’ Blog

I am excited to be a member of the DEN. I am a fourth grade educator at the Huntington Elementary School in Brockton, MA. This past year, myself, along with 4 of my colleagues, wrote and were awarded the Hewlett Packard Technology for Teaching Grant. Through the professional development provided by this grant, we purchased a license for Discovery Streaming. Since that time, I have used Streaming in my daily planning and teaching practice. Our team has recently been awarded the Leadership Grant in conjunction with the HP Technology for Teaching Grant which we are truly excited about as we may now extend all of the benefits of the grant to 10 more of our colleagues and their classrooms. We have shared the benefits of Discovery Streaming with our IT Director and persuaded him to extend the services to the rest of the District.

The Brockton Public Schools is classified as an urban school district and has a diverse student body with varying cultures, interests, and family backgrounds. Each classroom at the Huntington School is dynamic and unique. My classroom community includes 23 students of whom 17 have a secondary native language. It is important that I do all I can to provide students with the learning experience that allows them to gain a greater understanding of concepts. Lessons must be rich with vocabulary, and provide background information on a variety of topics. As educators we know that it is extremely important to provide relevant background knowledge and content that draws on the experiences of the students. Discovery Education Streaming has provided us with so many resources to supplement the curriculum and provide students with the comprehensible input needed to access the curriculum. It has engaged my students and motivated them to become independent researchers and constructivist learners in their own right. Each day, streaming is used as a natural component of instruction and learning. As we learn about current events, we turn to Discovery ATLAS to learn more about the relative location of countries, identify the qualities of the country that fit within the 5 themes of Geography, and become active investigators to answer our own questions.

Although I have only been using Discovery Education Streaming for a year, we have found so many uses for it in our classroom. In our recent study of the Solar System, we created our own News Broadcast using Discovery’s editable videos and Movie Maker! The students were amazed that they could be “producers” of their own News Broadcast. In addition, we have been practicing with some of the Web 2.0 programs and the images provided by streaming to create discussion forums using voicethread.com and creating videos using animoto.com. Discovery Streaming has so much to offer, our community can’t wait to exhaust its every resource!

I am looking forward to being a member of the DEN to learn from its members and expand on the resources Discovery has to offer!