An information packed day at DEN NI
Today was dedicated to lots of cool technology for education. First we listened to Hall Davidson’s Keynote on using cell phones in the classroom. Thanks to “mizmercer” for moderating the Live Blogging! The rest of the day was dedicated to breakout sessions. There were many choices involving many different uses of Discovery Streaming, Geo-caching, Multimedia Presentations, Second Life, and AFI. I attended Hall Davidson’s session on ways to use DE Streaming with Google Earth. So many cool things to do, so little time! To access Hall’s Google Earth codes visit http://www.discoveryedspeakersbureau.com/node/87 I also attended Brad Fountain’s session on Podcasting. Brad showed us new ways to use Audacity to make Podcasts as well as lots of applications for Podcasting in the classroom. In the afternoon I spent some time with Lance and Matt, Adobe Premiere Elements and some very tempermental computers. After several frustrations we accomplished making a video using the green screen! Too Neat! Dinner was an event within an event! THE DEN CARNIVAL! Cotton candy, games, tickets for prizes and Bingo (Dengo actually). Thanks so much to all of the dedicated Discovery employees who helped make tonight so much fun. Matt M… you can’t stump me with your trivia questions!
DEN National Institute off to a big BOOM de yadda!
Our first day at the DEN NI in Silver Spring Maryland was a big hit! I drove down from PA and arrived hot and sticky to a room FULL of people gathered around laptops. MY KINDA PLACE! Extension cords streached everywhere and the room was “a twitter” with folks networking (pun intended… although it seems that most of us are “plurking” rather than “tweeting”. Right away Lance got us going on a project. He put us into groups based on our region and set us to task making our very own Boom De Yadda video. Matt Monjan took the PA group on a great tour of the building. You would not believe the scope of this place! Matt says over 1000 people work in this building alone. We even visited Matts cubicle that he shares with Hall! We took TONS of pics and got to work! I served the group as the “Movie Editor” using Movie Maker. Others went to a quiet room to record audio while Jan worked as our “internet capture” person using her smartboard software. It truely was a group effort. View our video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4UEqeME7Ak After dinner we watched all of the groups videos and they were hilarious! Matt gave a quick overview of the changes in Discovery Streaming. Then we were set off for some “Dessert Sessions” Dennis shared a great photo editing site called Gimp that does most, if not all of the great things that Adobe Elements does, and it is FREE! Brad showed us all ways to use Animoto and encouraged those Stars who had not yet taken advantage of the FREE pass given to us during Teacher Appreciation Week to do so… make sure that you put the promocode “discovery” WHEN you sign up… Justin (with a monkey on his head) introduced folks to the code for adding “Callouts” to Movie Maker. We also discussed the “Blue Screen Technique” that allows you to “chromokey” on Movie Maker. WHAT A FULL DAY!
