Northwest

Greetings from San Antonio, Texas. I am knee deep in the overwhelming adventure of NECC. They say that everything is bigger in Texas. Well, everything is definitely bigger at NECC. Every way you turn, there are choices to make. Incredible learning and networking opportunities from dawn into the wee hours of the morning. I started off my NECC adventure with a great dose of DEN. DEN treated us to a great day of learning at the Enchanted Springs Ranch in Boerne, Texas. I was excited to meet many DEN members who, to this point, I had only communicated and collaborated with online. I also enjoyed visiting with DEN members I had met at last years DEN Institute. Enchanted Springs is a working ranch with exotic animals and an old west movie set. We enjoyed learning about new things coming to Discovery Streaming such as many new and exciting videos including When We Left Earth, The Body Human, Planet Earth and Grossology. We had a lot of fun watching a trick roper entertain us with the help of many of our brave DEN members. The DEN team had a Show Down and shared lots of great ideas for using Discovery Education Streaming. Lance talked about a partnership with Donor’s Choose, where DEN will actually market our projects. Matt shared how you can created closed captions for any video with a bit of HTML code. Hall shared how to quickly make a 2 (really 4) second instructional video. Justin shared how to add blubbles and call outs by pasting code in Movie Maker. Brad shared how to add Discovery Streaming video clips to Google Earth tours and Steve shared Mogulus where you can create and manage your own personal online TV studio for free. We went on a fun tractor ride through the ranch. We got to meet Woodrow the Longhorn and we had a fun scavenger hunt where we searched the Old West town looking for hidden treasures using clever clues. An old west adventure would not be complete without a barbque dinner. Thanks DEN for a great day of laughing, learning and networking.

(When links are up for these ideas and resources, I will add them here.