DEN Blog Network

Time is ticking away for to register for the upcoming Innovative Learning Conference in San Jose, CA.  It’s a conference you won’t want to miss!  So here’s 3 important things to know….

1) DEN is hosting a Pre-Conference event on Monday, October 13th.  Seating is limited… so make sure you RSVP ASAP.  Invite is attached below. Note: You do not need to register/attend the ILC Conference to attend this special event.

PreConference Invite

2) What conference would be complete with out one of our famous DEN events?!?  This time we are going to blast to the past at Peggy Sue’s Diner on Wednesday, October 15th.  Join us for burgers, milkshakes, rock-n-roll music and a step back in time with Hall Davidson. Limited seating so RSVP ASAP.  Invite attached below. Note: You do not need to register/attend the ILC Conference to attend this special event.

ILC DEN Event Invite

3) Save your “moula” By using the special DEN code to register for the ILC Conference you will receive a $40 discount… and lunch is now included in the conference registration for Wednesday and Thursday! Here’s a link to learn more

For additional questions regarding ILC and DEN, please email Jannita_Demian@discovery.com

Lots of good news in the weekly update for 10-3-08.  Enjoy!

We are very excited to welcome the Missouri Leadership Council to the ranks of over 20 DEN LCs.  We are sure they will do some exciting things across the state and look forward to seeing the DEN grow in MO.  Drop by the Missouri blog and say hello.

Just in case I haven’t thanked the 2400+ attendees of the Streamathon enough, once again I’d like to extend my appreciation for your attendance.  Additionally, we received over 150 comments on the blog about the Streamathon.  We drew random numbers and the following ten people won themselves an official DEN gym bag!

Sheila Taylor
John Phillips
Dianna Kenney
Teryl Magee
Anthony Cimino
Lori Abrahams
Chad Lehman
Mary Decker
Ray Waller
Suzanne Wesp

If your name is listed, please send Lance (lance_rougeux@discovery.com) an email with your shipping address.

Congrats to everybody who participate and thank you for all of your feedback! See you at the Virtual Conference!

The DEN team is going to be at ILC 2008 this year, and we hope that you will too!  We’ve partnered up with the ILC team and gotten permission to extend a $40 discount to any DEN members who pre-register for the conference.

The Innovative Learning Conference (ILC) 2008, will be held October 14-16 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA.  Now through Oct. 10, DEN members can get a $40 discount off conference Early Bird fees when they enter the promotional code ORG40 during registration. If you are a STAR Discovery Educator and you’ve already pre-registered, send an email to hall_davidson@discovery.com and you’ll recieve information for how to get credit for the discount.

ILC 2008 is a “must-attend” professional development opportunity, offering educators, administrators and technology leaders a chance to experience first-hand the latest innovations in classroom technology. More than 150 concurrent sessions and nearly 40 workshops will provide thought-provoking strategies, applications and practices. ILC 2008 will also feature an expansive exhibit hall where attendees can view the latest products and services from some of the nation’s leading technology companies, with more than 100 top solution providers in attendance.  To learn more, visit their webite.

As requested by hundreds of people (literally), we have now posted the vast majority of the 2008 DE streamathon presentations as archives!  If you visit our streamathon page you’ll see that most of the presentations are now hyperlinked.  Click on a hyperlink and you will begin to download a high resolution archive of that presentation.  Each archive is about 100-200 MB so the downloads may take a little while.  However, we wanted to make sure we provided them to you in high resolution so you’d be able to see all the live demonstrations just as they happened the day of.

We hope that you enjoy attending sessions you couldn’t be at that day.  And if you learned something from a session, be sure to share it with your colleagues!  The more people that learn from these presentations, the better.

Don’t forget!  If you enjoyed the streamathon, you’ll love the other webinars we have to offer.  Visit our webinar registration page and see what suits your needs.  Hundreds of webinars are listed there, all of which are FREE and open to all educators!

Enjoy the update for 9-26-08.

The DEN fleet has left the harbor and is looking for a bountiful fall harvest of STARs from all around the country.  It’s a short season and the six DEN captains need your help catching new STARs. 

If you recruit a new STAR by December 1, 2008 and report your catch, you can pick from the following:

• Deadliest Catch Season 4 DVD set
• Planet Earth: The Filmmaker’s Story
• Mythbusters Season 4 DVD set

In addition the crew that recruits the most STARs will walk away with bragging rights and a very special DENliest Catch chicklet to post on their blogs, websites and email signatures.

Meet your captains:

Kim Randall guides the Wild and Wacky Western
AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR and WA

Justin Karkow commands the Center of Attention
AZ, KS, MO, ND, NE, NM, OK, SD, TX, UT and WY

Mike Bryant skippers the Dawn Treader
IA, IL, IN, MI, MN and WI

Dennis Swain leads the Northeastern
CT, MA, ME, NH, NY, RI and VT

Matt Monjan navigates the high seas with MPEG: Queen of the Mid-Atlantic
DE, MD, NJ, OH, PA and VA

Brad Fountain captains the Southern STARs
AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN and WV

On Tuesday, Tim Magner kicked off this year’s EdTechConnect series in grand style by speaking about School 2.0. As the Director of the Office of Educational Technology, Tim coordinates the development and implementation of the DOE’s technology policies. If you missed the webinar, you can watch the archive of it here! The volume is a little low, so I reccomend you use headphones to listen to it. Also, while the slides are hard to read through the flash interface, you can download the presentation here to view it full screen.

FYI, we are using a new method to publish our webinar archives. It’s Discovery Education MediaShare, a web based content sharing platform that can be used for so much more than just sharing videos. However it also does that rather well, so we’ll be using it throughout the year to get our archives published much more rapidly. What do you think of the new format?

If you’ve been salivating over the idea of jumping into the Challenge since we first announced it, then today’s your lucky day!  Starting today, middle school students across the Unite States are being encouraged to “go green” and team up for the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge, the first and only national K-12 sustainability educaiton initiative aligned to education standards and uniquely tailored to match students’ growing comprehension abilities thorughout their school-aged years.

The Siemens Foundation, Discovery Education and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) have partnered on this unprecedented initiative to educate, empower and engage students, teachers and communities to become “Agents of Change” in improving their community. Student teams from sixth through eighth grade, under the mentorship of a teacher or adult supervisor, can register for the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge at www.wecanchange.com.

Teams of two to three students will identify an environmental issue in their community, research the issue using scientific investigation, and create a replicable green solution using web-based curriculum tools powered by Discovery Education. The mentors of the first 100 teams to register and complete a project for the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge will receive an award-winning Planet Earth series DVD set. Submissions from middle school students will be accepted through March 15, 2009. The initiative expands to elementary schools in 2009 and to high schools in 2010.

This is just the tip of the iceberg here.  Get yourself involved early and help your students Change The World!