COSMEO ONLINE HOMEWORK RESOURCE PROVIDES DISCOVERY CONTENT.

For parents who want to make their children's online time more valuable and ensure that they're not only surfing --but also learning -- online, Discovery's COSMEO may be this year's back-to-school "must have."

COSMEO is a Web-based resource that provides students and their parents access to a library of Discovery's educational content -- including content teachers use in schools with a similar Discovery product called unitedstreaming.

COSMEO's content is aligned to grade-level and state curriculum standards so that online learning can be mapped directly to what kids are expected to learn each year in school.

Discovery Education Executive Vice President of Home Services Melanie Bowen said the company developed COSMEO for a new generation of students who are replacing the $1500 encyclopedia set with dynamic online tools like Wikipedia.

"This is a generation that studies and learns vastly differently than any before it," she said. "They live online and spend hours with interactive media. After seeing how successful our interactive content was in schools, making it available at home was the next logical step."

Mark Hall, a teacher in Florida's Saint Cloud High Schools said that kids learn differently today and believes that multi-media content is a great way to get a student's attention because it appeals to more than one sense.

"Whether they are watching a video, reading an article or playing a game, kids can be engaged visually or audibly. These days, you have to do whatever you can to reach kids through multiple channels," he said.

The multi-media format works, according to Donita Powell, a teacher at Santa Gertrudis Junior High in Texas.

"When we first got a video-based learning service at our high school -- also through Discovery -- I used it in my social studies class. After that class, a student came back to me who was having difficulty in physics and asked me if there was anything that could help him. He downloaded relevant videos and went back and passed a big physics test. He wasn't getting it, but when it came alive through video, it was like a light bulb went off."

National studies indicate that today's students prefer to use interactive technology and media both in school and after school. In fact, they're spending upwards of six hours a day using them, leaving little time for the traditional methods of completing homework.

More than 800,000 teachers across the country are savvy to such trends, and like Hall and Powell, they are using Discovery Education's unitedstreaming online multimedia learning service to teach kids in the classroom, and with good reason. Students who have used the service in school perform 12 to 25 percent better than those who do not.

For more information, visit http://www.discoveryeducation.com or call 202/775-2672 or visit http://www.cosmeo.com.