You’re a teacher eagerly looking forward to a couple of weeks of summer bliss, right? Wrong! Summer is the time for intellectual rejuvenation, creative inspiration, and learning. Let the Discovery Educator Network help you meet these noble goals. Check out some of the fantastic FREE webinars from Discovery Education.
Discovery Education First Look: Back to School Updates 2010 http://links.discoveryeducation.com/DEFirstLook
June 1 – June 29
Be the first to get a look at back-to-school updates to Discovery Education streaming. With this insider access, we’ll take you behind-the-scenes as we show off the latest content, features, and resources months before it will be rolled-out to the public.
50 Ways in 5 Days http://links.discoveryeducation.com/50Ways5Days
July 1 – July 29
This webinar series is packed full of the best instructional uses of Discovery Education, featuring content rich contributions from some of the top users of Discovery Education streaming.
DEN Summer School 2010 http://links.discoveryeducation.com/DENSummerSchool2010
August 2 – August 19
Who ever said summer school isn’t fun? Get ready for your school year with an amazing series of free professional development sessions from the Discovery Educator Network (DEN). Week 1 = Digital Storytelling, Week 2 = Professional Learning Networks, Week 3 = Project Based Learning
Click here to learn more about how Discovery Education is transforming teaching and learning.
Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever. While climate change is the greatest challenge of our time, it also presents the greatest opportunity – an unprecedented opportunity to build a healthy, prosperous, clean energy economy now and for the future.
Earth Day 2010 can be a turning point to advance climate policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy and green jobs. Earth Day Network is galvanizing millions who make personal commitments to sustainability. Earth Day 2010 is a pivotal opportunity for individuals, corporations and governments to join together and create a global green economy. Join the more than one billion people in 190 countries that are taking action for Earth Day.
Here are some great resources to use with students to engage them in hands-on activities and critical discussions about their world.
The first is a ShareTabs page with links out to 13 environmental calculators to track energy and resource consumption.
Discovery Education and the Siemens STEM Academy partnered to bring a special webinar to students and teachers. If you missed the STEM Connect Webinar featuring Philippe Cousteau, Earth Day: Celebrating our Past and Future Efforts to Conserve our Oceans, you can catch the archive and classroom activity on the STEM Connect webinar page. Don’t forget to check out the student challenges and activities sponsored by Philippe’s EarthEcho International.
I’m here in St. Charles, IL, for ICE 2010 – facilitating a Discovery Education Boot Camp full day workshop. Here are the take-away resources from the workshop.
WordSift was created to help teachers manage the demands of vocabulary and academic language in their text materials. WordSift helps anyone easily sift through texts — just cut and paste any text into WordSift and you can engage in a verbal quick-capture! The program helps to quickly identify important words that appear in the text. This function is widely available in various Tag Cloud programs on the web, but we have added the ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. We have also integrated it with a few other functions, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships (incorporating the amazing Visual Thesaurus® that we highly recommend in its own right) and Google® searches of images and videos. With just a click on any word in the Tag Cloud, the program displays instances of sentences in which that word is used in the text.
Click here to take a quick video tour of the service.
Here is an overview of how I would use WordSift with a primary source speech available from Discovery Education streaming.
Step 1: Search for the speech and download the transcript.
Step 2: Copy/paste the transcript text into WordSift.
Step 3: Use the word cloud to ask students to identify main ideas, themes, goals of the speech, intended audience, or to develop questions they believe should be answered by the speech. This could be done as a “pre-reading” strategy to develop the structures for “during reading” focus.
Step 4: Identify key vocabulary by creating customized word lists to make the vocabulary stand out as a different color.
Step 5: Isolate words for further discussion by dragging them to the workspace.
Step 6: Use image and video clues.
Step 7: Click on the words to populate the Visual Thesaurus widget.
Step 8: Use sentence context clues to make meaning of the vocabulary in the context of the speech.
Step 9: Place the sentences back into the full text to use nearby context clues.
Here are some quick tips for bringing WordSift into desktop presentations.
Click on the About link on WordSift to see the myriad ways educators have been using the service and visit the educator videos posted under Demonstrations.
For Discovery Education subscribers, you can use WordSift with the Encyclopedia Articles, Speech Transcripts, Reading Passages, and any other media asset types that contain digital text. Quick Tip: If you are using a speech, be sure to check out the Speech Guide that contains media resources for scaffolding and provides historical context for the speech.
I’m here in Austin, Texas, at the Bob Bullock State History Museum for the TCEA Discovery Education pre-conference. We are joined by the phenomenal Texas Leadership Council. They will be ustreaming the entire day!
To advance a new generation of education technology leaders, Discovery Education, renowned for its quality content and digital media services in over half of all US schools, and Wilkes University, a leader in graduate education, have teamed up to create the online Master of Science degree in Instructional Media.To thrive in the 21st century classroom, successful educators are embracing a new approach to teacher instruction. New tools. New technologies. A new appreciation for digital media. From Web 2.0 to digital storytelling, to virtual field trips, the 21st century classroom has the power to engage and inspire today’s tech savvy students. This degree provides teachers the tools, knowledge and strategies to be successful 21st century educators.
Learn about the program from our amazing course designers, check out student projects, and more at our brand new website: www.discoveryeducation.com/masters
Every Tuesday educators enrolled in the Discovery Education Wilkes University Instructional Media Program get together to share ideas. Join them on February 16, 2010 as they have Daniel Pink, author ofDriveandA Whole New Mind, dropping by for an hour-long discussion. All the details can be found here. Click here to join the webinar.
Access the Exploring Discovery Education Tutorials within Professional Development (accessible after logging in)
Access the new STEM Connect resources as well as Discovery Calendar, Discovery Interactive Atlas, ReadyZone Continuity of Learning, Lesson Plan Library, and Thematic Focus Library within the Teacher Center.
Differentiating instruction can be a challenge, but the judicious application of engaging media and creativity inspiring technology helps to make DI a breeze.
For DE streaming users, did you know that you can now filter the media library for primary sources? Just go to Advanced Search in the top DE page banner and select “Include only Primary Source Titles.”
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I’m here in Austin, Texas, at the Bob Bullock State History Museum for the 
