MILTON — Santa Rosa County Schools will continue partnering with Discovery Education, which provides digital content to the district.
The Santa Rosa County School Board has voted in favor of continuing to use Discovery Education’s streaming service.
The database helps teachers by providing a visual aspect for students learning language arts, math and science — and it's just part of the district's participation in the digital revolution.
Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Bill Emerson estimates the school district has used the streaming service for the past five years.
‘The way it works, as a teacher is developing lesson plans and developing those resources to support certain standards, they go to the Discovery Education streaming site and there is just tons of resources,” Emerson said.
The service costs the school district $116,000 a year, but Emerson said the cost is worth it.
“They have lots and lots of videos,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about copyright, we don’t have to worry about going on YouTube and checking the content for vulgarity.”
The service’s use varies by school.
“All of the schools are using (the streaming service), but not to the same extent,” he said. “There might be a school that has 15,000 log-ins and there maybe another school that has 500.”
To bring each school up to speed on how to use the service, Emerson said the school district will offer training.
In addition, he said the school district will launch a pilot program next school year called ‘techbooks.’ He said the overall goal would be to keep providing the same material as a text book, but have updated information and interactive features.
“When you buy a text book for five years, whatever that text books says, it never changes,” he said. ‘With digital resources, whatever happened last year can be reflected in this year’s videos.”
Discovery Education’s techbook service will be used in the elementary grade level, specifically with instructors active in the school’s science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, or STEAM curriculum.
If the trial run is successful, techbooks could mean the end of using text books, Emerson said.
“It’s hard to bite off that we are not going to have a text book in a student’s hand; it just feels better knowing you have a text book,” he said.
“But we want to try it out and let our teachers use it a little bit for a couple of years, and see if they think it can be a replacement for the text.”
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: School board to continue using $116K streaming service, add digital books