Classrooms - Discovery versus Google?

Most schools are now well into the digital world, adopting technology initiatives in many different shapes and formats. Our district is a "Google" world, and Google Classroom is a great alternative to Moodle, Edmodo, and other formats for organizing and assigning digital resources and tasks to students. With Google comes You Tube, Google +, Google Docs, and a whole lot of other things Google. Before we had Google, however, we had Discover Education (also known by some of us "oldtimers" as Unitedstreaming). Although not every school's faculty has been trained in recent years on this feature of Discovery Ed, it also has a classroom aspect for assigning videos, assignments, quizzes, and writing prompts.

So which is better?

On the one hand, Google is everywhere, and easy to log into since everyone in our district has a gmail account. With Google +, it's all linked together in our drives, and opening the classroom app is just a few mouse clicks away. The class discussion postings are private so all students can participate in them (unlike on a public discussion board where parental permission is required). Google forms can be used as quizzes to test comprehension of a topic, and embedding links, images, videos, etc. is incredibly easy.

So why even bother with Discovery Ed? Well, you never have to worry about the videos being blocked for one thing. That new iBoss and Guardian filtering system sure does make using You Tube a bit more challenging these days! All videos in Discovery Ed will play with no blocking (although previewing all videos in their entirety is a definite must). Discovery Channel shows, some from National Geographic and the History Channel, as well as a huge host of nonfiction video clips are all available for anyone in our system. You just log in and go! The videos can be bookmarked and organized in your account for easy reference next year too. This is all well known to most teachers who've been around for a few years. The classroom part is what most never knew existed.  All students are in the process of being updated (it hasn't been done due to some sync issues with Power School and the iCloud), and they just use their school log in to open DE. A teacher can create a class, enroll his or her students easily, and then create assignments for videos. These can be quizzes, discussion questions, and writing prompts. For some types of assessments, DE will even score the answers!

So, once again, which is better?

Why choose one?  I recommend using Google Classroom as the overall class setup. Then, make an assignment to log in to DE and watch the video clip, answer the questions, etc, just like any other assignment. This gives you and  your students the best of both worlds: the ease of Google with the videos of Discovery Ed...and you don't have to download, upload, or cringe that the software has been overzealous in its video blocking!