Discovery Education Espresso Launches New Features to Engage Pupils

ESPRESSO LAUNCHES NEW FEATURES TO ENGAGE PUPILS WITH DIGITAL CONTENT EVERYDAY

Discovery Education today announced new features and enhancements to its award-winning primary school learning platform, Discovery Education Espresso. The latest updates combine dynamic new tools with the amazing, timely content teachers have come to know and love, giving educators new ways to seamlessly create exciting and engaging learning activities every day. Discovery Education is the worldwide edtech leader whose state-of-the-art digital platform supports learning wherever it takes place.

Ever since its debut more than 20 years ago, Discovery Education Espresso has been known for its expansive treasury of digital resources, which includes videos, text, interactives, audio, worksheets and images that span all primary key stages, subjects and critical topics of today. Each month, Discovery Education adds new resources — including ready-to-use activities, age-appropriate news video from trusted partners and curated channels — to excite, engage, and connect school pupils to the real world.

Now, Discovery Education is building on its legacy as the leader in digital content by adding a host of new time-saving features to support teaching, creativity and professional growth.  These new features include:

1. A new, interactive Quiz tool, giving teachers new ways to promote active learning in the classroom and track pupil progress in real-time with:

• Ask Live Quiz – enabling teachers to spark lively classroom discussions by asking pupils live questions through virtual meeting solutions like Zoom, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams
• Standard Quiz – helping teachers to check for understanding and pupil readiness through a range of question formats, from polling and open-ended questions to multiple-choice and image annotation.
• Video-Based Quiz – combining video from Discovery Education’s rich vault of high-quality content with embedded questions to create engaging interactive learning experiences.

Quiz results display in real-time, empowering educators to measure participation, offer just-in-time feedback, correct responses and identify where pupils need extra support or challenge.

2. A new improved Studio tool, making teacher and pupil-created activities easier than ever. Studio, Discovery Education’s collaboration and presentation tool, serves as educators’ creative outlet to imagine and practice new activities. And because Studio and Discovery Education’s world-class content are part of a unified system, creating interactive and media-rich lessons is more straightforward than ever.  With Studio, educators can:

• Use new Activity Templates based on Discovery Education’s SOS Instructional Strategies —­ the research-based instructional strategies created by teachers for teachers —­ to create lively presentations that engage pupils.
• Give pupils the opportunity to share their knowledge in creative ways through their own presentation boards and slideshows.
• Collaborate with pupils in real-time within the confines of a safe and secure environment no matter where the classroom is.
• Promote literacy, accessibility and comprehension for all learners with the embedded Microsoft Immersive Reader Tool.

3. A completely redesigned Video Player. The new Discovery Education Video Player not only matches the platform’s lighter, redesigned look and feel, it also makes it easy for teachers to incorporate rich media into the learning experiences they design and deliver every day. From the new Video Player page, teachers can:

• Build interactive video quizzes or slideshow activities in a few simple steps.
• Assign videos directly to pupils and add context and instructions.
• Share videos with pupils and colleagues using a simple link.
• Find supporting resources and content such as images, interactives and audio.

4. New ways to easily log in to the Discovery Education platform. 

Pupils can now use QR codes for quick access. Administrators can bulk-issue these codes at the school level or teachers can issue codes for their own classrooms.

Together, these new features and enhancements support the creation of interactive learning experiences that spark curiosity, make classroom activities livelier and engaging, and provide the literacy and language supports that give every pupil the opportunity to have their “light bulb” moment.

“Integrating all the edtech resources stood-up to maintain the continuity of learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is a major challenge facing school leaders,” said Discovery Education’s Managing Director, Global Initiatives Howard Lewis.  “The new features and enhancements we are announcing today help solve that challenge. The improved functionality of our flagship platform puts all the tools needed to engage pupils 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 schools already have in place. Taken together, these features and enhancements will help schools improve the return on the edtech investment they made over the past year.”

Educators using Discovery Education Espresso and all Discovery Education resources benefit from the support of the Discovery Educator Network (DEN) Community . This global community of education professionals connects members in schools and around the world through social media, virtual conferences and in-person events, fostering valuable networking, idea sharing, and inspiration.

Explore the re-imagined Discovery Education learning platform at www.discoveryeducation.co.uk. 0

The author

Rhiannon Challenger

Community Engagement Manager and Editor at Nexus Education. BA Hons English Literature.

https://www.nexus-education.com/