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Announcing Discover: Our new Q&A digital library
- Saulius Bertauskas
- Apr 24, 2020
- 4 min read
Introducing our new Discover feature on the 100mentors web and mobile app for educators
Discover is the display window of our community question-answering platform. Educators use 100mentors to minimize the gap between students and academics, executives, and practitioners all over the world. Within focused topics, students pose their wonderment questions, while field experts actively support inquiry with their 100-second personalized video answers.
Now, all these valuable pieces of knowledge are within your reach and free to use. On Discover, you can browse through hundreds of ready-to-go questions and answers. Choose your subject of interest, the topic you teach, or career-related content and explore what students wonder about and what experts reply to them. There are several subcategories that can make your journey even easier.
The role of Discover in your physical or virtual classroom is even more important during this period of closed schools and distance education. Teachers and students are in constant search of reliable content and suitable forms to continue their educational pursuits – if not to enhance them. Discover is tailored-made for bringing inquiry-based teaching and learning to the forefront, especially when asynchronous instruction is the sharpest tool in the box.
What sets Discover apart from other community question-answering resources
Discover is the latest addition to our edtech platform: a knowledge hub that exclusively addresses our educational community. The questions featured on Discover are raised by students in strictly educational contexts, under the umbrella of their teachers’ focused topics. Therefore they tend to be relevant, feasible, and have learning potential. At the other end, experts are aware that their main audience is students. In other words, questions and answers both adhere to specific educational needs and goals instead of generic purposes. Most importantly, Discover sets the tone for meaningful inquiry with engaging examples of wonderment.
Discover ultimately allows for the sharing of experts’ most valuable interactions with students, and making knowledge access more open. Having a pool of verified experts to provide answers raises the stakes and opportunity to connect with the brightest minds. We and our community actually know the mentors who offer their insights, as well as their credentials, before they take on this responsibility. They communicate with students and educators in a 21st-century-style, summarizing their knowledge and experiences in bite-sized video answers instead of never-ending texts. For a generation of digital natives, we’ve created a learning environment that feels familiar to their social apps, so you can both be sure they are safe to explore independently, or at your prompting.
What can this unique educational environment do for the improvement of teaching and learning in your classroom?
5 ways Discover promotes inquiry-based instruction
Get to know students’ common inquiries in advance Through Discover, you get a solid idea for students’ inquiries related to your subject. In other words, you know what questions to expect and you can be prepared when these issues are raised in your own classroom – physically or virtually. Students’ learning potential is maximized when teachers acknowledge the obstacles novice learners meet from the very beginning.
Expand students’ research fields If you find an interesting question on Discover that your students haven’t thought of just yet, you can always present it to your students through the 100mentors web app. Then, challenge them with a relevant assignment or project to expand their inquiry field. Through this very brief question presentation, you can set an example for the wonderment questions your students should aim for – especially since it came from one of their peers.
Invite students to embrace different perspectives In case there are multiple answers to a question, you can set a debate: let your students build on mentors’ perspectives and touch base with the experts. They may find much in common and would boost their self-confidence about your subject. They can also discover different cultural approaches to the same subject and get a valuable opportunity to elaborate on diverse local and/or global contexts.
Offer authentic content to students To make your subject more relevant to students, you can enrich your content with mentors’ answers “fresh from the oven.” In order to meaningfully learn, students need to establish connections between school knowledge and real-life experiences that are interesting and relatable for them. On Discover, you can find cases straight from the action that will motivate your students and engage them with your subjects’ respective theory as well.
Bookmark questions that suit your lesson (exclusively on our mobile app) If you experience Discover through your 100mentors mobile app, you can use our Bookmark feature to mark the questions that have made an impression on you and keep them all under the Bookmarked questions section. This can give you a head start for organizing and implementing your inquiry-based lesson.
Take a journey on Discover to envision how it can serve your curricular goals. We currently have questions and answers on display for Business Management and Economics topics, with more to come soon. If you don’t relate to these subjects, you can always wander around our career-related content. New material is produced every day on the 100mentors platform.
Your subject may appear soon on Discover; register now to be notified as soon as it does!
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