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Using Discovery Education Streaming with your science lessons


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Does anyone use Discovery education streaming? Is it worth the money? I've seen it on homeschool coop for half the price so I'm considering it for the future and was interested in hearing others opinions. Have you tried it and liked/disliked the videos? Is the quality of the videos good enough to plug your computer into a tv to show it larger and still have quality?

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My mother is an educator so she gets access to this for free. She lets me use her log in to view the videos.

 

Short answer: no. I would never pay $200 a year for the service.

 

Long answer. My son is in Kindergarten so we do more informal science. I search for videos to go along with history and science whenever he has questions or interests. They have all the Magic School Bus videos and those are nice. It is nice to be able to go find something to answer a question: he asked the other day how fish breathe underwater and I was able to find a video about fish respiration geared towards k-2 graders and it was just perfect. I use it maybe twice a month to help solidify a concept.

 

Why not more frequently? Because the search is awful. It is so hard to find something useful. Even if you know what a video is called it is hard to find it. It is nice to be able to sort by K-2, 3-5, and other grade levels, but in general it's a pain to find something useful.

 

The quality is not good. I have not found any video that is in HD. While we have projected it onto a big screen just be aware that is will be bad quality. My son doesn't care. I don't care. But I would be mad if I had paid $200 a year for it.

 

The videos are good that we've watched. But it's hard to find just what I'm looking for, it's bad quality, and they don't have nearly enough. I read that they used to have Sid the Science Kid, Liberty Kids, and other animated educational shows. I would have really liked to have those since my son is young. They don't have those any more. I think they are losing content, which is never a good sign....

 

Anyway, my son is young so maybe you'd find it more helpful. Do a search for other input. I know others have lots to say about Discovery Education Streaming. What I've seen, however, has been mostly negative. Although some people find it a valuable homeschool investment, I believe the consensus is that it's not worth the high price.

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I am one of the few people who loves Discovery Education. We don't watch TV and have no expectations about HD video. We use it mostly on the iPad and the quality is just fine for us. Yes, the search isn't great, but we've had it so long that I've gotten good at searching and navigating. We have found some real treasures not available elsewhere.

 

However, I don't think science content is its strong point. We use it a lot for history, culture, social studies, language arts, Spanish, some math (mostly when DD was younger). They have a separate Science Discovery Education but I have no experience with it.

 

So, I don't think it would be a good fit for your purposes.

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