Maryland Leadership Council

While it may have been a gray day in Maryland, it was a perfect day for a virtual conference and meeting up at 1 DP. I think this was the biggest conference for the DEN with 300+ participants. If you missed it, don’t worry because all of the sessions were archived.Thanks goes to:

Our Virtual Host Steve

Our Local Hosts Matt and Jeanette

Fred Deleventhal, Riptide Furse, for helpful tips in Second Life and for taking pictures

Mary for a spooky and fun Second Life experience

Aaron  for his humorous comments through out the conference

All presenters at the Virtual Conference

Most of all those participants that came out to share experience of the conference as a group.

For any of you who live in or near Harford County, Maryland, be sure to stop by Staples in the Tollgate Shopping Center, Bel Air on Saturday, August 15.  I will be there from 9 to 1 greeting teachers and letting them know about the Discovery Educator Network.  Renee Henderson will be at the Staples in Clinton, MD, and Selena Ward will be at the Staples in Bowie, MD.  Even if you’re a seasoned DEN member, feel free to stop by and enter your name in a raffle to win some pretty cool prizes!  If you don’t live in the area, you can visit the Staples Teacher Appreciation Day website and find out when your local Staples store will have their day of deals for teachers.

For those of you who may have missed it, today was the fabulous 3rd Annual DEN Streamathon!  Steve Dembo hosted the nearly 12 hours of presentations from his deathbed (this may be a slight exaggeration) while superstars like Hall and Matt (just to name a couple) showed some awesome things we can do with tools from Discovery Education and other places.

To try and cover everything that was demonstrated and shared in those 12 hours would do it all an injustice, although I have been assured that most of the presentations have been archived and will be provided soon.  Suffice to say that so much cool stuff was shared that towards the end several of us felt our heads were so full of cool new stuff that they were fit to burst like overripe fruit at a Gallagher performance (but in a good way).

Steve himself hung in there like a trooper, or more accurately like the stereotypical telethon host - you know, with the wrinkled suit, 5 o’clock shadow, and the look on his face that says he’s doing this because he cares deeply for this cause but why oh why did he agree to an all day telethon? (Just kidding Steve, you were awesome as usual!)

Attendance was awesome as well.  I myself saw no fewer than 200 people logged into the chat room, and several of them were representing rooms full of people.  It may have gotten as high as  300, but I was teaching a class at that point so I didn’t get to see it for myself.

Feel like you missed out?  Me too, and I only missed a few hours of it!  Well don’t worry, while the DEN doesn’t do many 12 hour events (Steve’s health and sanity would lie in the balance), there are still plenty of free webinars you can attend - all you need is a web browser and a phone, and in many cases just the web browser will do!

On Wednesday August 13^th, educators from Maryland, D. C. and Virginia met to have a “Day of Discovery”. We heard presentations from Scott Kinney and Hall Davidson. Both were wonderful speeches where each man shared invaluable information on how to engage students using technology. During the day we attended three breakout session where the teachers were introduced to ways to really make engaging PowerPoint’s using embedded videos and sounds, many different ways to use Discovery Streaming to in your classroom and ways to asses students using Movie Maker (free download), Photostory(free download) and Adobe Premier Elements. One part of the day that I found very interesting was Hall Davidson’s talk about how to use cell phones for education. If you have a Nokia phone you can use Qik to have live cell phone feeds. If your phone takes videos, you can upload your videos from your phone to You Tube. Ever use Jott? You set up an account and then the user can send a voice message and it is transferred into text. Interested in podcasts? Go to G Cast. At Poll Everywhere you can set up a poll that can be accessed from all of the country using your cell phone. If you use Twitter, you can have use Twitter from your cell phone. All in all, it was a wonderful day!