Thousands of educators online and in-person congregated together, as the DEN team went house to ‘house to house’ to explore the many digital treats available to educators today. During this unique professional development event, attendees had the flexibility to attend online or in-person at one of many regional events hosted by the DEN Leadership Councils.
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.
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 TripsviaMedia Share and then back to yourBuilders 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.
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.
Coming Soon! Media Share at the DiscoveryEducation will be found through the Educator Resources tab. MediaShare is a digital media management server; a place to organize internal documents, files, forms, a publishing platform, internal memos, and/or presentations.
This would be nice for presentations and workshops so that all pieces are bundled together on one page and you don’t have to have 10 tabs open. In the description field, you can place embed code, such as VoiceThreads or Glogsters. In addition, you can publish Blabberize, Glogster or other documents here, to keep students from getting lost viewing things on a site that may not be educational (Blabberize as an example). DES has uploaded many presentations from over the years, such as the virtual conference in April. It also includes the chat window that matches the presentation.
There is a direct link to these files from outside the DEN. You can create a complete lesson and give the URL to your students and they can create a user name (anyone can get into the education resources by creating an account), and view what you wan them to see.
When searching for lessons that have already been uploaded by other DEN members, search the DES MediaShare to find information for you such as: 8th grade/images/world languages.
Subscribe by RSS feeds as well. Especially if you like one person’s resources and want to know when they post something new.
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