Florida

Received word from Darlene Wolfe here in the Orange County, FL area of an event that might be beneficial to some of you. If you are interested please read further on below the images.

Educators, guidance counselors and administrators may register on line at http://www.fdmec.org/registration/event_012208.htm . More information for this free program is at the registration site ( http://www.fdmec.org and select register for January 22nd event). Since we do have a cut off point due to the size of the meeting area, participants will receive an email confirmation for them to print and show as both parking pass and free entrance to the Science Center.

The program begins with optional tours of Otronicon and the Orlando Science Center . Otronicon explores gaming, simulation and digital media in education and entertainment. A networking hour with snacks follows. Then, we have presentations from educators involved in the changes, industry professionals who will share what they look for in employees, and an update on the Digital Media Banner Center to be housed at Seminole Community College and on the coming programs, and changes in secondary and PSAV digital media curriculum.

Tom.

As August approaches, do you find yourself thinking about the  students who will be in your class this year?  Wouldn’t it be great if each one of them came with a blueprint into their learning styles?  What if you knew the multiple intelligence of each student in your classroom before you began planning your lessons?  Think of the power you would have to make sure that everyone was learning your material. 

Check out this great Multiple Intelligence website that will allow you to test all your students and receive a graph on each one.  Once you are on the website, you can enter my code (8v50348tt) to see the results of my MI test.  Karen Seddon showed me this wonderful site and suggested hanging the student graphs around the room. I would love to hear how you would use this information in your classroom.

Enjoy the site and don’t think about school too much yet.

Debbie

Somewhere over this past week our National Florida Institute was called this, an academic excursion. I really came to like it, isn’t that what we as educators want our students to strive for? It seems a vague concept, how can academics and excursion go together for them? I’ve a saying that I picked up years ago, and believe it or not, came from the back of a Tshirt my wife had. It goes: "Life’s a Journey, Not a Guided Tour". That fits into the concept of academic excursion. What we do as educators help our young and old students on their life’s excursion. Building them up into what we hope and pray to be successful adults.

Deep thoughts, eh? This was just something that I thought about all week as
myself and 50ish other STAR DEN educators "embarked" on the Florida National Institute’s floating conference. I was very unlucky enough to not be able to get typepad to update for any blog posts during the whole week. I basically got tired of losing my posts, so, I decided to just hold off, write stuff down and formulate my thoughts after we returned.

Florida was well represented at this week’s Institute, with myself, Ruth and Chris Paine, Carol Papuga, Janet Hallstrom, our Leader Chair Carole Gooden, Marie Colemen, and Melissa Lander. I’m hoping I can hit each of them up for a guest blogger spot here in the upcoming week so that they can share with everyone what an invaluable experience these National Institutes are. As for myself, it was great to reconnect with all of the Discovery Educator Network staff, as well as, some DEN members whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year at the summer institute in Silver Spring.

As for the events of the week, I will break down my thoughts on a day by day recap so as to not make this a super huge post:

Day 1 began with everyone converging on Port Canaveral. The embarkation process was pretty seamless and didn’t really take long once we got inside. Didn’t take long for me to find Marty Green from MI DEN so that we could get things rolling. Lunch on the ship, then it was time to get to learning. Joe Brennan shared some great tips for making movies. It was a real fast paced session, with barely enough time to get the notes I wanted typed/written up. He shared with us tips about types of shots, ways to set up a scene and to spark interest in the movie. We broke up into groups and worked on a 90second movie based on the concepts we just learned. Each of the groups did a wonderful job, with much joy and raucous laughter coming from everyone.

After all videos were shared, it was about 1030pm and we broke. The true networking then began as people who were strangers, having never met, or only through emails or Second Life, sparked immediate friendships and conversations.

Truly a networking delight. I will share more later tomorrow about my Day 2 Monday thoughts.

Tom.

I’m a little late (2 days actually since she got it to me via email). I called Cheryl on the phone and asked her to put together her reflections of the NECC experience to share with everyone. In her words:

Atlanta NECC was
fantastic! I really enjoyed all aspects of the conference! The best was the
exhibit hall. The vendors took time to talk and show and demonstrate their
products. Everything from hardware to software and everything in between was
displayed. I am not sure why I took any shirts with me as I came home with at
least a dozen new t-shirts from various vendors and I didn’t get them all.            

Another area of the
conference I really enjoyed was the playgrounds. I attended the AT for IT
playground, Open source Playground and 21^st Century Media Center
Playground. The Playgrounds were informal, all-day exhibit-style presentations
featuring interactive hands-on demonstrations of technologies and resources
available for specific topics. I really enjoyed this area as it had vendor as
well as actual users (teachers/parents/students) to talk with. I also attended
a hald-day workshop by Smart Technologies on Smart Ideas – Smart’s answer to
Inspiration. Other sessions I attended were on Web 2.0, 21^st century
skills, Special Education, and emerging technologies. NECC definitely created
excitement and energy for me to bring back to

Florida

and share what I can!

Don’t get me
wrong NECC was not just work-we had a lot of fun there also. Okay, now for the
entertainment side of NECC. Sunday was the Keynote and it was great with the
Atlanta Drum Corp entertaining us. Followed by Andrew Zolli to inspire us! Then
we were supposed to go to the aquarium for a tour and appetizers.

 Well
I made it to the Georgia Aquarium, just never made it inside. It had reached
its capacity and so they could only let people in as people came out. Gave up
on that and headed back to the hotel. Monday night was the DEN Birthday Dinner. Buffet
dinner, drinks and good friends old and new. It was great, who could ask for
more. Tuesday night I won a Hummer limo ride to the

Glenn

Hotel

sky top lounge for drinks and
food from Turning Point – then on to the Olympic
park for a block party and fireworks, sponsored by Net trekker, Atom learning,
and Promethean – it was awesome! Wednesday, I was unable to hear the closing
keynote so I could make it to the airport in time to fly out!

  Oh
yeah I won $50 cash from Net trekker for wearing their t-shirt in the exhibit
hall and the prize patrol found me! I also won about $500 in software from
Learning Services in a drawing.

Thanks Cheryl!

As for me, my summer of learning continues next week with the Florida Institute. (See Scott, I remember the ‘proper’ name for it this time ) I am looking forward to seeing many old friends and making new ones again thanks to DEN

Tom.

So how many of you are sitting out there reading the blogs and thinking, "I wish I was at NECC".  Well, the good news is that you can relive the best sessions of the conference through a podcast.  All you need to go is go to iTunes and seach for Conference Connections in the podcast library.  If you don’t have iTunes on your computer, it’s a free download for mac or pc! Our own Tom Turner is featured in the Discovery Educator Network session.  Way to go Tom!  You can also listen to Hilary Goldmann on ISTE’s Government Advocacy, Tech4Learning, David Pogue’s Digital Generation Comes of Age, and Jamey Osborne on Creative Commons.  Other sessions featured include Maureen Yoder’s Online Learning Tools 2007, Mitchel Resnick’s Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society, Howard Levin’s Making the Laptop Disappear: Moving to Seamless Integration, and many more.

The cool thing about Conference Connections is that Apple has produced this wonderful podcast not just for NECC but for all major conference across the country!  Did you miss a great speaker at FETC?  You can listen to it through Conference Connections! 

If you haven’t explored the world of podcasting,  I highly encourage you to become a podcatcher!

Debbie

P.S.  If you are interested in presenting at FETC next year, applications are now available.

How fitting that for our DEN NECC Preconference Event that we were meeting in Memorial "Hall" at Stone Mountain, GA. Our morning started with a continental breakfast overlooking the relief sculptures here at Stone Mountain.

The view of course was spectacular and brought back memories of climbing up Stone Mountain when I was a wee bit younger than I am now. We moved inside for Hall’s ever so collaborative keynote. Knowing Hall like I do, I can tell he put ALOT of work into making sure it went as smoothly as it went.

Following the keynote Lance started us off on our Team Challenge using unitedstreaming and Adobe Premier Elements and green screens. He shared with us a short tutorial on using Adobe Premier Elements and working in movie layers, cropping and chromakeying. The goal of our projects was to show us ‘interacting with animals’. We were given a saved folder with already downloaded editable clips, still images and sound effects from unitedstreaming.

We were also treated to several shows that we were given special treatment for. Nothing like having a show all to ourselves and although I didn’t go to the other parrot show (I guess that’s what it was, Scott Kinney said that’s what it was!) We also were treated to that other soft drink product (Coke that is, at least for me) with a cooler of it in our room at all times. As always Discovery took great care of us. It was a great time of sharing, connecting, and in my case reconnecting with friends and colleagues I’d not seen in a long while.

The one thing that I will say that I (re)learned is that Adobe Premier Elements is a VERY powerful tool to have in my arsenal. I’d received a copy of it last year, and sad to say it’s collecting dust. I will be adding a green/blue screen to my campus next year so that this can be utilized! Most definitely!!

____________________________________________________________________________

These notes don’t really make much sense…they were the sharing from the ‘collaborative keynote’. They were typed up as they were being presented.

• Control Tool box for powerpoint - adding a windows media player tool box and text tool box. Fully functioning windows media player embeded into the powerpoint.
• educasting.pbwiki.com - professional development for the AustinISD to introduce ‘educasting’ to their educators. "Risa de Dios" (God’s Laugh) An example of a digital story/educast done by a fifth grade teacher with a student.
• Canciones de mi Ninez - sharing songs: recording spanish songs to be coupled with either hand drawn or digital images to create a movie.
• 1800goog411 - google 411 beta 411 call; even more in google, google mobile resources; a.placebetween.us not sure what it is..but looks cool
• podcasts.cvsd.k12.pa.us/weblog
• homophones - using music with powerpoint to teach homophones. Song came from unitedstreaming. This is on the DEN resources site, not sure where, will add the link later

The question was raised last night by Karla Holcomb of the TN LC how Voki could be used in education. I received this voice answer to your question Karla from Karen S.

So here goes!

“Karen asked me to take this particular voki off….she will make a comment below as to her asking me to.”

Certainly hope this helps!

Tom
FL DEN Blogger

What does the producer of the Science Channel and an astronaut have in common?

They will both be on the Discovery Webinar today at 1:00!

If you haven’t checked out the new Discovery Virtual Project visit http://www.discoveryeducatorabroad.com/earthandspace/ and sign your class up for this collaborative project.

Here’s the link about today’s webinar and info on how to register…

http://blog.discoveryeducation.comdiscovery_educator_networ/2007/05/space_week_webi.html

Don’t miss this wonderful opportunity to bring science to life! 

Nothing like a deceiving title to ‘catch’ your attention! About a year ago I actually won something in a DEN contest at one of our Polk Socials. I had the choice of the Pilot episode of "The Deadliest Catch" or something else (see, it wasn’t good since I didn’t choose it eh?). As you can tell, I chose "The Deadliest Catch" DVD.

With all the hype that "Planet Earth" is getting, the "Catch" goes on and shares the perils of crab fishing in some of the worst office conditions I’ve ever seen. If you’ve not watched it, I would say to give it a whirl on Tuesday nights and you will be glued to your sets every week thereafter.

I used the show as a way to expose my daughter to where some of the food she eats comes from. We have since watched every episode in Seasons 2 and 3 together, usually coupled with a trip to an All You Can Eat Crab place at the end of the season. I will warn that there is some inappropriate language that is used, so if you plan on using portions of it in a classroom setting, screen it first prior and possibly pick certain scenes to watch.

Better yet, on the Discovery Channel website you can screen webisodes that show the anatomy of a Crab Vessel, interviews with deckhands and captains and even take a shot at being a crab boat captain in the "Deadliest Catch" Game.

Tom.