Pennsylvania

In my current position, or should I say positions(I wear many hats) I get to see a lot of exciting activities.  In addition to being the Director of Technology Integration for Propel Schools, I am the science coordinator.  I am the SOS or Specialist on Site.  I believe that this was due to my knowledge and experiences that I had through my years of teaching elementary and middle school science in 2 previous jobs.

Our district implements ASSET Science which is an Inquiry-based, hands-on science curriculum.  Many of you may be familiar with the FOSS curriculum which is very similar to Asset. If you do, you know that it is hands-on and comes in a kit.  If you do teach either FOSS or Asset, here is a great resource for you to use. http://www.fossweb.com/ Another component of Asset is the use of Carolina resources in addition to the Foss kits.

While at Propel East, I stopped into a classroom teaching a Catastrophic Events unit. In this unit students investigate the causes and effects of thunderstorms, earthquakes, and volcanic activity. Global heating, the water cycle, plate motion, plate tectonics, magma, ash, and effects on the atmosphere are studied in depth.  On this day, there was no lab, no small groups, no experiments, but rather a very interesting, engaging, and intriguing guest speaker named Mara Falk.

At first glance, Mara seemed like just another guest speaker until she began to tell her stories of being a Storm Chaser with Discovery. She talked about how she had interviewed for a job that just turned out to be an extreme weather show on the Discovery Channel called, “Stormchasers.”  Her stories were captivating, telling how she was the driver of the scout(storm chasing vehicle) and how every second was of such importance.  Watching the student’s engagement while she talked what was interesting to me, as 100% of the children were engaged and posed such great questions for Mara. One story she mentioned was of an elderly man who wanted to wait out a particular storm.  On this particular day, it was not a great idea as the storm was very intense and had started to rip through his house.  Lucky for him, the force of the winds through his house took him to his bathroom where he was thrown into the bathtub with the door forcefully falling on top of the tub.  This miracle in disquise saved this elderly man’s life as his entire house crumbled on top of this bathtub. 

With this said, I cannot believe that our school was fortunate enough to have this guest speaker come to speak to our children. 

Now….here is the cool part.  Since you are reading this, you are probably a teacher who has access to Discovery Streaming.  If you do a keyword seach for Storm Chasers, you will see various videos from the Storm Chasers series as well as other teaching materials you will find useful.

In the DE Streaming PLUS webinar hosted by Justin Karkow, those 100+ of us attending were very excited by the enhancements the DE team created for us. The look and feel of the new interface, to quote Debbie Sawyer (and Justin followed through on this one) was “yippee skippy.” In short, we LOVED it! We were lively listeners, and the chat was a buzz of activity (that Justin kept up with seamlessly!). I thought I would follow up with some webinar Q&A chat.

Co;yright: A number of us simultaneously raised the copyright issue flag. The answer is that despite how we use and share our streaming work, whether in Glogster, Google Lit Trips, VoiceThread, or any other Web 2.o tool, the streaming will ask for authentication before a user could open it. Since you will have to have a registered account with DE Streaming PLUS, you will be able to access. Sans account, no access. And one of the most important features of streaming: DE vets its videos, providing three forms of bibliographic citations for 8700+ videos.

Built-in Blogs: When Justin discussed the assessment piece available through the builders, we asked if the new enhancements included a blog (beyond our STAR DE blogs, one for student participation). The answer is no, but Justin suggested that we create and embed a VoiceThread to engage students in the response piece.

Search Suggestions: Similar to Amazon (but much better, we thought) was a new aspect of searching. When you locate the stream of your choice, PLUS provides additional suggestions for your viewing, based on your search. In addition, each video can be rated, and provides the number of frequency hits, rating its popularity.

Writing Prompt and Assignment Builder: Participants said that in the past they used the passcode feature but this newer easier integration is even better. Writing prompts allow .html code so you can embed a variety of sources to your assessments. An interesting feature Justin mentioned (not advocated) is that DE Streaming sometimes works as a filter to allow access to YouTube videos. He does not recommend using it that way; rather he mentioned that it sometimes works that way. He cautioned us that we should always give our districts a heads up to the technologist in charge if we intend using it this way. Zamzar (my favorite) and Vixy are good YouTube converters.

Editable Videos, Green Screen, and Creating CounterFactual Videos: Can we mashup editable videos, use green screen techniques, and create counterfactual historical scenarios in video? The answer is yes, but they should be behind a filter, not be sent out to YouTube or a similar host, and must have accompanying bibliographic citations. For a one-shot presentation that has no commercial applications, yes, you can go for it. From Cindy Lane, who was a wealth of resources: you can grab the green screen effect for MovieMaker freeeee!

If you are looking for some great (fun, fast, and free) resources from our DE team, Justin has shared (via Media Share) a GREAT explanation, step by step, of the new enhacements to DE Streaming PLUS. Click here to view.

Download and Share Options: With PLUS, you can select how you choose to download. If you want to enable Flash for your district, all you need to do is have your Technology Administer contact DE and they will give your system access. My favorite thing of all (and this is a hard call, because I have so many favorites) is the share feature. One look says it all. Enjoy!

And from PA’s own Matt Monjan, here is another resource.

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Justin Karkow hosted the first of many back-to-school webinars on the enhancements to Discovery Education Streaming PLUS. Today’s sneak peak shows some of the wonderful features that will be coming your way this summer if you are a Discovery STAR Educator! If you are not, you might want to check out hot to join us and share the wealth of resources of the DEN. As I was getting ready for today’s webinar, I had the advantage of having sneak peek at the Leadership Council Symposium. But Karkow really brought the fine tuning home in an hour packed with the new features we all loved! We were amazed with Justin as well, running two computers and answering our chat room questions as they popped up in the chat. Truly a grown digital native.

If you are familiar with DE Streaming, then you are probably asking yourself how the best got better. Hard to believe, but it did. I know I won’t catch all the features, but here are a few. The interface, as you might tell from the image, is much different. When you log in, your assets are listed in your dashboard, and your services (think product subscriptions) to the right.

When you click the streaming PLUS (upper left dashboard), your Subject/Grade Search, Additional Media Packs, and Curriculum Standards Search scaffold on the left sidebar. The center section is your video player that updates Week in History and New Videos. The sidebar to the right houses your Builder Tools, Teacher Center, and Professional Development.

Our responses during our webinar of over 100 participants was overwhelmingly positive. We could hardly wait to play with the new ways to conduct a universal search, which includes all of your Discovery Education assets, and how you can narrow or expand, as well as save searches in My Content. One thing became crystal clear: the new streaming PLUS is a one-stop place to shop. By using streaming content, working with your builders, creating assessments, evaluating them and providing remediation for students, with everything connected to your curriculum standards, you truly have everything under one platform.

Here’s what I love. Discovery will send you an Excel spreadsheet where you can enter all your students by your classification (Period 1 or class identification) and they will batch them into your account. Or, you can establish your classes yourself. Or, you can have the students enter a code and set up their own accounts. Justin said that Discovery can handle batching large districts/classes–no problem. I know which option I’m exercising. Once students have access, they can stream and share, but they cannot download. That feature is reserved for teachers. If you are wondering about safety, you can set up accounts for students that limit their searches by grade level. If you do not want elementary students accessing high school content, you can establish search parameters for students, or create content for your students so that they have limited but secure access.

There’s always a moment, according to Justin, where the rubber hits the road in DE streaming — and for us it was how you could marry streaming PLUS to Google Lit Trips via Media Share and then back to your Builders with Discovery Assessment. This is so awesome you have to try it; I’ve been playing with it and it is just so amazing. I always say if I can do it, so can you. So here goes.

Not that I’m lazy, but time is our greatest problem in education, no matter what our role is. Whenever I do not have to reinvent the wheel, I’m happy. I’ve borrowed a Google lit trip for Grapes of Wrath from Jerome Berg, a veteran English teacher who developed and maintains the Google Lit Trip Project. I like his project as is, but since I would like to add a Discovery streaming PLUS video segment “Voices from the Dust” to a placemark, I’ll download it to Media Share to get embeddable code. Copy the embeddable code and put it into the placemark as a video for the google lit trip; add the copyright source from the video. Then you can link to your builder for student feedback with an assessment and add a writing prompt in “My Builder.” A really neat feature is that you can add the .html code from the video to writing prompt, so the video will be there for the students to revisit. I’d call completing this circuit by customizing the Joad road trip for different placemarks where the rubber really hits the road. Since this post is already longish, I’ll save some more neat things you can do and some resources from Matt and Justin for another post.
Discovery Education streaming PLUS
Google Lit Trips
Discovery Assessment
Media Share
The Builders
Justin Karkow
Turbo Tagger

Hard to believe, but school seems just around the corner, especially if you factor in a week of professional development for educators that many districts mandate. Much as I see summer slipping away, I love the new changes in Discovery Education Streaming PLUS and am so excited about bringing this fantastic resource to my students in September. At the Leadership Council Symposium (was it two weeks ago–time does fly) we got a sneak preview, but you can too by registering for a one-hour webinar on July 14 or 21 at 1 PM EDT.

I am also excited about Summer School with the DEN. Where else can you find timely professional development that is fun, fast, and free. Digital Storytelling Week kicks off August 3, with tools and trade secrets to get you to think outside the slide with storytelling made easy with Discovery Education Content, Animoto, and PhotoStory. Director’s Cut using Discovery Education Media and MovieMaker followed by Discovery Education Media and iMovie round off Week 1 of Digital Storytelling.

Week 2 Leadership opens August 10 with The Information Society is HERE: Are Our Schools Up to the Task? I have been reading Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D.’s blog Dangerously Irreverent ever since Christian Long wrote “The Future of Education Manifesto” and invited McLeod to mash it up. Responding to it became my English 10 mid-term exam, along with “Did You Know” from Karl Fisch. This keynote promises to bring an exciting beginning to the week. I wouldn’t miss this webinar for anything! Policies, Safety, and Social Networking is followed by Web 2.0 for Administrators and Others: Schools, Tools, and the 21st Century. Data-Driven Decisions with Discovery Education Assessment–love this newer offering and its related blog–The Dean’s List, authored by Porter Palmer (met her at LC Symposium and promise to write about her blog next) is a great finale to Leadership Week. If you can possibly leverage your administrative teams to participate, this week will definitely pay huge dividends to their educational learning communities.

August 17 opens Week 3, so get ready for Myth Busted: Easy Ways to Integrate Digital Media into your Science Classroom. I’m one of those people with an academic allergy to science, but I have been following Brad Fountain’s Science in Action, and he is definitely making me a believer with his weekly lessons (I am actually beginning to understand science). Now that you are getting into the swing of back-to-Discovery-School, you’re ready for Getting Your Hands Dirty with Discovery Education Science. Differentiating Instruction with Discovery Education Science Assessment Manager and More and Muir Tech Tips for Going Green round out a great week of science offerings. You can read about this finale for science week here.

Web 2.0 Week 4 premiers August 24. During this week you Get You Glog On! with The DE Streaming Builders and Glogster. Then, The Thread that Ties It All Together: Discovery Education Content and VoiceThread leads into Virtual Field Trips with Discovery Education Media and Google Earth. We end four weeks of learning on a fun note–Learning Through the Funnies: Mixing Discovery Education Content with Free Comic Tool.

I know that all of these wonderful webinars would be more than enough to rev us up for back to school, but this is Discovery, so there’s more. Between our wonderful partnerships with Mimeo and Scotch® Science Fair Central, teachers and instructional technologists have great new resources to bring to the classroom. You might want to check out Science Fair Central before Science Week debuts. And for those non-digital hands-on projects, don’t forget to put Scotch® Products on your students’ supply lists this fall. With items like Double Sided Tape, Precision Scissors and Removable Poster Tape, they’ll be well equipped for another year of science projects, posters, displays, and reports.

On a personal note, I would like to thank the DEN community’s huge support while I was hospitalized last week. Knowing how much I had your well wishes and prayers meant everything, so much gratitude from me to you. You are quite a learning community family.

DE Summer School
Discovery Education Streaming PLUS
MediaShare
Scotch® Science Fair Central
Mimeo
Scott McLeod
Turbo Tagger

Discovery Education streaming PLUS was recently reviewed by Multimedia and Internet @ Schools and imagine our surprise when we received an absolutely perfect rating: 5/5 stars! Of course, to those of you using DE streaming PLUS, this won’t be much of a surprise, but the review is well worth reading and sharing. A quick highlight from it:

Discovery Education streaming Plus is an absolute must-have tool to provide students with a richer, deeper understanding of topics under study. This is a great way to provide differentiated instruction, to allow for various styles of learning, and to enable students to become “eyewitnesses” to the events, places, things, and people studied in the classroom.

The flexibility of this resource can’t be topped. Educators can use an entire video or just a short segment to illustrate a point or to quickly demonstrate a concept. The latest version of streaming Plus provides two important features—the ability to differentiate instruction for ELL populations through the new world languages media and materials available in hard-to-find languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Arabic, as well as the opportunity to access comprehensive programming such as PBS productions, Planet Earth, Smash Lab, and more.

Discovery Education streaming Plus is a service that will enhance curriculum, meet standards, differentiate instruction, and—most importantly—expand the academic achievement of your students. Highly recommended.

To read the entire article, click here and register an account at MMIS, or download the PDF.