Dorman’s Trouvailles

Join us for our final DEN webinar of the school year on May 26 at 7 PM ET.  We will discuss all things DEN-related and unveil some very special awards to members of the DEN community in our first-ever DENnies Awards Ceremony.  Register today!

STAR Discovery Educators are invited to join us on June 18 and 19 in Silver Spring, MD for a special strand of the SilverDocs International Film Festival – SchoolDocs.  Great professional development, access to screenings, and more!  If you are interested in attending either day, contact Lance Rougeux (lance_rougeux@discovery.com) asap.  We have some Educator Passes to offer to our STARs, but the supplies are limited.

For all the info about AFI SchoolDocs visit: http://silverdocs.com/idc/school-docs/.

It’s been awesome to spend time in DeKalb County, Georgia, with the educators from DeKalb County and the surrounding areas. Thanks to all the educators who attended the Day of Discovery for making my first event in Georgia a terrific one! And a HUGE “thank you” to Georgia Public Broadcasting and DeKalb County Schools for sponsoring the day and Arabia Mountain High School for opening its beautiful facility to host the event.

Since the title of my presentation was “Go Green with Discovery Education streaming” I thought it appropriate to post all the resources from my session online instead of printing paper copies for everyone.

50 Ways to Go Green with DE streaming

Video in PowerPoint 97 2003

Video in PowerPoint 2007

Widgets for Your Builder

Homophone Song (PowerPoint)

Homophone Song (MyPlick)

Discovery Education WM Think Green Classroom

All of the DE streaming media assets incorporated into this presentation can be downloaded online and the citation for each is included on the presentation slides. Don’t forget that you can access lots of additional integration ideas for DE streaming media in the Professional Development section of DE streaming.

We’re celebrating all week, but today is extra special – National Teacher Appreciation Day.  The entire Discovery family really appreciates the DEN community.  Our STARs make our jobs a lot of fun and in return we want to make sure you receive the support you need.  So for today we thought it would be a good idea to equip all STAR Discovery Educators with some extra resources for the summer.When you log in to the DEN website you will see a Teacher Appreciation Week box in the upper left hand corner (above your profile).

Follow the directions to get an upgrade that will give you 90 days of free access to Discovery Education Health, Discovery Education Science for Elementary and Discovery Education Science for Middle School.  You now have the Discovery suite just in time for your summer planning.

There is a new series on the Discovery Channel that has me hooked, Doing DaVinci.

Leonardo da Vinci was the original Renaissance Man — master of science, master of the arts, master of war. His revolutionary designs were the most advanced weapons of their day and were capable of unparalleled destruction. Yet no proof exists that they were ever constructed.

In Doing DaVinci a team of expert builders will try to construct these unique inventions using only materials available in da Vinci’s own time. It’s a modern twist on the classics, but will these outrageous machines work? Or were Leonardo’s genius ideas better left in the history books?

Mondays at 10 p.m. ET/PT

This series is devoted to testing the plans and inventions imaged by Leonardo da Vinci hundreds of years ago.  There are also some terrific interactive resources available online:

• Da Vinci Timeline
• Leonardo’s War Machines
• Da Vinci Video Highlights
• Da Vinci Personality Quiz
• Da Vinci Puzzles
• How Da Vinci Works

If you are interesting in exploring the world of Da Vinci with your students, be sure to check out the resources in DE streaming and DE Science.  In streaming teachers and students can access 24 full videos, 53 video segments, 9 articles, and 18 images.  Here are a few highlights:

• Achievement of Leonardo da Vinci – video segment
• Leonardo da Vinci – full video
• Leonardo da Vinci – article

DE Science subscribers can access 3 full videos, 8 video segments, and 3 images.  One of my favorites are the three video clips about da Vinci in Understanding Robotics.

EdSITEment has a series of great lesson plans that are part of “Leonardo da Vinci: Creative Genius.”

Science NetLinks also has a few lesson resources for teaching about da Vinci:

• Leonardo’s Machines
• Exploring Leonardo
• Mona Lisa’s Smile

So, if you are looking to bring one of the Renaissance’s greatest thinkers to life in your classroom or you are brushing up on your history for a Dan Brown novel, check out some of these lesson resources and Doing DaVinci on the Discovery Channel.

I admit that I am a bit of a Twitter junkie.  It’s not like I get the shakes when I am away from Twitter for too long (though, TwitterBerry may have something to do with that . . .)  Really, Twitter is one of the primary places I go to learn.  I have an AMAZING professional learning network populated primarily by Discovery Educators and Twitter is one of our primary sharing platforms.  Sometimes I just jump into the Twitter stream and immerse myself in collective knowledge.   Other times I enter with a specific purpose of seeking answers or suggestions.  It’s a bit like open swim verses lap swimming at the local pool.

Twitter polls are a terrific way to accomplish the latter.  I have used twtpoll numerous times to gather information in a highly visual format.  I have found twtpoll to be very effective in gathering information quickly and succinctly.

There are a couple of other really good Twitter polling applications:

PollDaddy Twitter Polls

StrawPoll

All of these polling applications are simply a way to visualize the results you might receive with @responses on Twitter.  One advantage is that respondents have anonymity which, for some questions, may increase your response percentage.  Plus, you “see” the results instantly without having to filter through responses over time.

So, if you are looking for a quick way to harness the collective intelligence of your professional learning community on Twitter, try out one of these free polling applications.

[Note: Cross posted on Cliotech]

I’ve been looking for services that could possibly step in where GCast starting charging and phone.io might just fill that void. I already use drop.io constantly to share resources with others and collab.io for virtual meetings.

phone.io is a service of drop.io designed for recording voicemail directly to the web, and podcasting. In two clicks you get a custom phone line and record MP3s instantly to the web. You can then share via web (URL), email, iTunes, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook ‘outputs’.

Make a phone.io ‘drop’ for voicemail and podcast now

drop.io
phone.io
podcasting
audio
RSS
Twitter
Turbo Tagger

May 4-8 is National Teacher Appreciation Week.

What are you doing for Teacher Appreciation Week?

Be sure to visit the DEN blog every day to check out all the fun planned for our STARs.

[Note: Image from Flickr: Sharna11, Teacher Gift]

Join our live Science Class broadcast on Tuesday, May 5th at 1:00 PM EDT.  We will be exploring different types of chemical reactions including changes in energy and exothermic.  You can also find an experiment you can conduct with your class after our live broadcast on the Science in Action blog .  The live broadcast will air on the Science Class section of the Science in Action blog.  We look forward to seeing you there.

[Image from Flickr: Move the Clouds, Beaker]

In order to maintain your STAR status, you must report at least two of your events for the 2008-2009 school year by August 31, 2009.  Log in to the DEN website and you’ll see “Report Event”.  If you are not sure of how many events you’ve reported send an inquiry to den_events@discovery.com.