DEN: Florida

Now is the time for change and the National Educational Technology Plan is the place to start.  At NECC 2009, a collaboration event was created to gather “high impact, researched-based recommendations” from teachers and education professionals that would help drive the future of education and technology.  Today’s students need a plan to bring their education up to speed.  Your opinions are requested by July 12, so let your voices be heard.  Click on the link to join this web-based outreach event.  https://edtechfuture.org/?page_id=316.  

Day 2 of  Den Leadership Council Symposium

Follow us here http://dmantz7.edublogs.org/cover-it-live/

Agenda for today:

• What is DEN? New Application Process
• Building an Event
• Regional teams
• Sharing
• Lunch (regional)
• 2DP at 1DP
• STAR Adventures
• Closing

More information to follow!

Lee Kolbert - Chair
Debbie Young Bohanan – Blog Coordinator
Melissa McBride – Events Coordinator (South)
Tom Turner – Events Coordinator (North)

Blog Team
Tracie Belt
Marie Coleman
Michele Futch
Cheryl Watford
Cheryl Woolwine

Events Team
Dawn DeWitt
Janet Hallstrom
Trudi Lawless
Ruth E. Manlandro
Carol Papuga
Cheryl Woolwine

Four of the Florida, DEN Leadership Council members are enjoying a few day in Silver Spring, Maryland at Discovery Headquarters; Lee Kolbert Den Chairperson, Tom Turner Events Coordinator for N. Florida, Melissa McBride Events Coordinator South Florida, and Cheryl Woolwine events/blog team member. As usual Discovery is treating us like royalty.
YOU CAN FOLLOW DEN LC LIVE AT: http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/pennsylvania
MORE TO FOLLOW CHECK BACK LATER!

I received this on Friday from Melissa McBride (still Lander to me but she knows that!). Palm Beach County will be hosting a Day of Discovery down there. The date is Saturday, March 28th and the beauty of this event is that it is FREE! Register  here by March 13. You can also view the agenda here.

Email myself or Melissa for any questions (mithrass@gmail.com or melissa.mcbride@palmbeach.k12.fl.us)

Tom.

Thursday was the first full day for FETC. It was a very weird feeling. The sessions started before the opening keynote. I was still trying to get a grasp on that. It’s all well though. Began the day with Hall’s Featured Session titled “Thinking Big as the World Gets Small”. I of course asked his permission prior to his presentation starting if I could ustream out his session. Knowing he’d be well okay with it, I had everything set up, so all I had to do was take care of the settings. You can view the presentation here in case you aren’t down here at FETC.

With lunch needing to be eaten and a Discovery Focus Group I volunteered to take part in, I missed out on the 2nd and 3rd sessions of the day. That’s well and okay, as the keynote was given by Philippe Cousteau. He weaved a wonderful conversation with the teachers here at FETC about his work, his life and his family. I thought the most touching moment of the keynote was his sharing a video clip of his father along the Nile River.

Afterwards, we were off to the VIP reception in the corporate room where we were able to do a meet and greet with Philippe. Having worked with and around celebrities prior to becoming a teacher, outside of last year and Jeff Corwin as the keynote, I rarely get awestruck with celebrity. Mr. Cousteau impressed on me greatly with his willingness to talk to everyone that came up to him, take pictures and sign autographs. He is well to be commended for his openness and humbleness towards the teachers who were coming up to him. Thank you Discovery for such an privilige to be able to meet such a fine and honorable person.

More tomorrow and hopefully we can finally get Debbie Bohanan hooked up with being able to access the blog.

Tom.

I’ve had to explain it a few times and without going into too much detail, it’s been a rough couple of months with some family issues since my last post for Florida. For that I do apologize. It looks like the rough part is behind us and it’s time to move on. With the new year just starting, it’s time to start fresh. And what better way to start it then with FETC 2009 upon us.

 It’s hard to believe that we live in the state of Florida. About 50ish DEN Stars met up early yesterday morning to head out to the Central Florida Zoo for this year’s DEN pre-con event. We huddled our way out there on a VERY chilly morning, TOO chilly for me. We started our morning with a session on Voicethread with Lee Kolbert. Personally I am always forgetting about voicethread as a tool to use in my reportoire of tools. As always, Lee did a great job in sharing how best to use voicethread in the classroom.

Our new regional manager, Justin followed Lee with sharing Glogster.com . Glogster is a combination of video, graphics, hyperlinks, text and music all rolled into one.  It definitely lends to a way to create movie or book trailers with little fuss. The ability to add the video though looks to be a great way as an alternative to begin webquests.

We were able to take an icicle pop tour of the zoo. Was very hard to focus on what the zoo guide was saying to us personally as I was constantly seeking out the usually only sunny spot at each of the animal areas. As with any DEN event we were tasked with an assignment. To create using any media “My DEN Story”. Unfortunately the tech gods were not with us this lovely day, as the wifi in the room was not strong enough to handle 40 bandwith hogging DEN Stars to complete their projects.

Alls well though, the DEN team huddled and moved us along with Plan B (at least I think it was plan B). I’m not really sure what they are calling it now, but I remember it vividly being used for the first time as “Cruising with the STARS”.  Volunteers from the group were asked to share their best tool that they use with everyone else. Here are the highlights of that session.

FuturesChannel.com (Katy)
2nd-12th grade; science movies videos and activities

Discovery Education + CDWG Win a wireless lab competition

GoAnimate.com (Brad)
Web 2.0 site where you can create your own animated video using templates, DE streaming images, voiceovers, and much more.

Jing (Katy)
Jingproject.com; screen capture application.  Creates stills and videos…great for tutorials!

Gizmoz.com (Tracie)
‘The best talking characters ever!” Allows you to upload your pictures into templates, make adjustments add voice overlays.  Tracie uses this to spice up her “do now” activities for her kids each day.

Portaportal.com (Sonda)
Create collections of bookmarks to share with others.  FREE!  Groups can register for their own collection that they can manage and maintain.

Scracth.mit.edu (Melissa)
All education based movie creator.  Creations can be saved in project folders and shared.  MIT is keeping a close eye on this content to ensure that it is appropriate.  Empowers kids to create great movies!!

Wordle.net (Marcia)
Creates a visual representation of words that are pasted into Wordle (e.g. Obama speech).  Ideas shared include doing a Wordle of your school’s mission statement, doing an analysis of words used in student writing and using filters to show different representations.  Placing a ~ (tilde) between two words will keep them together!!

MovieMaking.com (Carmen)
Video tips and tricks to help you and  your students create their own movies.

Alice.org (Mary Jo)
Inspired by Randy Pausch (Last Lecture) to encourage girls to explore computer programming.

Googlelittrips.org (Mary Jo)
Collection of Google Earth files that compliment the book that you are reading with your classes.  Organized by grade level, teachers can download KMZ files that will import place marks into your Google Earth favorites.  Be sure to check out the trip or Big Anthony which was posted by Michigan STAR, Andy Losik.

In an effort to get this out in a time crunch, I will come back and add the direct links to the words. I’m heading off to my presentation on the exhibit hall floor and I’ve just plum run out of time. I’ll also get more out later today about the first full day of FETC.

Until then.

Tom.

July 14 – 18, 2008, Lee Kolbert (Palm Beach) and Cheryl Woolwine (Palatka) Florida DEN Stars, attended the DEN Leadership Council Institute, in Silver Spring MD. It was held in the Headquarters for Discovery Education. Once again Discovery out did itself. They treated us like royalty for 5 days. Food was awesome, lodging great, and the networking was the best ever. They always seem to know the right projects to get us to excel and share our techie knowledge. We started out Monday, creating our own version of the Discovery Channel commercial, Boom Di Yada – you can see our version here (South East) http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/tennessee, we only had about 2 hours to complete it. Tuesday was another busy day. Hall started us off with an awesome presentation on using cell phones. We took publicity pictures with Mr. Kinney on the 10^th floor, (for those of you that don’t know that is “SCOTT” to us).  The Den crew put on a carnival sideshow for us with prizes, cotton candy, and a beared woman. Wednesday came and we still did not stop; Steve Dembo’s presentation “Down the Rabbit Hole”, ways to communicate, ways we are doing it currently, and how we see presentations changing (streaming, back channeling, etc.), was ustreamed. Some of our own Den Star members put on presentations for us sharing new ideas, software and websites.  Discovery took us to dinner on the Potamac River – what a wonderful evening. After dinner we toured the monuments. Thursday the fun continued. We were able to visit DCTC and experience the green screen effect. Thursday evening after working all day on projects we had a screening of an upcoming discovery project on Comets. A pizza party followed then Guitar hero and other WII games on the big screen – a good time was had by all.

Friday we shared projects and were a little sad that our time together was coming to an end. We twittered and plurked and streamed and back channeled and …… and shared and shared and shared.

Oh I almost forgot they gave us stuff also. We received a T-shirt from Animal Planet, a polo leadership council shirt, USB hub (cool), and a green screen blanket.

I guess you could say it was a successful week  - it definitely did a lot to improve my Professional and Personal Learning Network.

Special Thanks to Lance, Matt, Steve, Juanita, Brad, Dennis, & Brian, and anyone else that made this week possible.

“I just got home from NY this past week….will share some of my NECC precon and NECC thoughts with you later today”

I missed this announcement from Jannita and Lance in my email 2 days ago. See what happens when I’m on summer break. I forget to look there. The webinars were yesterday, however, I’m sure she’d be happy to answer any questions you have. I will be seeing the DEN team this weekend and will post what I hear.

Discovery Education is excited to announce many new GREAT additions coming your way to streaming! This includes the long awaited and asked for Student Center where your students will have ability to log on and download media, better correlation with your state standards, more refined search, an update builders and my content, not to mention that the base package has increased to 5,000 titles!

For additional questions please contact Jannita at Jannita_Demian@discovery.com

How many of you will be going to NECC this week? I fly out tomorrow morning and will be making it over to edubloggercon at the convention center tomorrow afternoon when I get in. For those of you traveling out to San Antonio this weekend. Please be safe and see you all soon.

On a side note, how many Second Lifers are out there? Just wanting to take an informal poll.

 Dedra Stafford is seeking some help from fellow DEN members. Below is her blurb

I have been selected as one of the four candidates to run for the NMSA South Region Trustee. If you have not committed to one of the other candidates, I would be honored to have your vote and support. I am also hoping that you will help me gain more support in your area. I have attached a flyer that I have prepared for the election. Ballots were mailed from the NMSA office sometime last week in firstclass postage a white envelope the size of a tri-fold brochure. This package will contain a brochure with NMSA candidate information, the ballot, and a return envelope.  Please keep your eyes open for the ballot and cast your vote. Here is the link for info on the election: http://nmsa.org/AboutNMSA/BoardofTrustees/NMSAElections/CandidatesBallots/South/tabid/729/Default.aspx

Dedra Stafford
MPS Technology Integration
staffordd@mustangps.org

How many FL DEN Stars got into the Summer Institute up in Silver Spring? I know a few from the top of my head that are going to the LC Institute. This will be the first summer in 2 years for me not doing any DEN summer events and it has me hurting. I will miss seeing the entire DEN team along with all of the other DEN members that I like to call friend from around the country.

We’re also coming to that time of year that we call the ‘END’. Which means NECC is around the corner as well. How many will be attending NECC this summer in San Antonio. For us Floridians, we see the penultimate Tech Conference as FETC here in Orlando. My friends, please if you have NOT attended NECC, I would highly recommend saving some money in some way to get out to one at some point. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

About a year ago, I shared with everyone an addon/tool called diigo. Much to my dismay, it didn’t take off as quickly as I would have hoped for. However, the potential was always there. Over the last 3 weeks or so, the use of diigo among the edtech community has skyrocketed. Jennifer Dorman posted over on the PA blog about a DEN diigo group. Just another way to stay connected to the latest DEN information and links that are available.

Tom Turner

mithrass@gmail.com

http://tnturner.edublogs.org