Pennsylvania

I will never figure why I am surprised with the innovation that defines Discovery. Just when I think there’s nothing new under the DE umbrella (pardon the rain allusion, but that’s been Northeast PAs forecast for most of this summer), they amp up your notion of premiere professional deveolpment. That’s why you do not want to miss the very special Explore Aftrica Today Webinar.

What is the Teach Africa Program?

The Teach Africa Program is The Africa Society’s response to the lack of Africa education in America’s classrooms. Through this program, we work with superintendants, principals, and teachers to include Africa in the curriculum of schools across the country. Teach Africa, in its implementation is comprised of three phases: Phase I is an orientation for superintendents and principals; Phase II is a daylong program with workshop training sessions for teachers; and Phase III is an Africa-immersion Youth Forum for middle and high school students.

Why is the Teach Africa Program Important?

In order to participate in the increasingly globalized world and overcome its immense challenges, today’s youth must receive exposure to and information about the varied cultures of the international community. However, many teachers lack adequate resources and training to properly inform their students. Teach Africa, The Africa Society’s flagship program, provides for this exposure and seeks to fill the void by equipping teachers and students alike with the knowledge and resources to educate themselves and others.

If you’ve read Pink and Friedman as well as Langwitches Need for Storytelling Skills, you begin to connect the global dots and see the sequence and the importance for tackling the challenges of globalization.

How Can I Participate?

Take a virtual expedition to Africa and join fellow teachers and students in a one-of-a-kind live web event! Explore the Republic of Benin, one of the most diverse areas of West Africa, with special guest His Excellency Cyrille Segbe Oguin, Ambassador to the U.S. from Benin, who will bring the diversity of the country, its people and cultures to life in an open, interactive discussion. Learn about changes taking place within Benin as the country embraces the modern challenges of democracy while honoring its heritage.

Tuesday, July 28 at 3:00 PM ET
Note: The webinar starts at 3:00 PM ET, but there is an opening and welcome beginning at 2:00 PM ET.
Register today!

The Bonus

In addition to learning, Discovery added an additional incentive:

The first 25 attendees to register and attend the online webinar will receive a dynamic board game that tests your knowledge of Africa.

The Teach Africa Program is comprehensive, with components for a Youth Forum, Teacher Workshops, and an educational phase for Superintendents and Principals. What a better way to kick off a potential new educational program than with a Discovery Education ground-breaking live WebEx webinar event.

Explore Africa Today
Teach Africa Program
DE Webinar
Globalization
Langwitches
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For your convenience, your PA DEN Leadership Council has created a Discovery Education Events Calendar. On it you will find all things DEN, whether it is a national virtual conference, a new program premiere, special promotional galas, a live WebEx event, an EdTechConnect special keynote series, or a regional or state event. Here’s your one-place to check what’s going on.

Because we are using a Google Calendar, you can add the DE Events to your personal calendar effortlessly. Jennifer Dorman, Discovery’s newest manager, is a Certified Google Teacher, and she gave a breakout session at the LC Symposium that prompted our LC to create a DE calendar for PA. If you are interested in a great GC tutorial, check Dorman’s professional wiki. Or, you can use the lower right “+ Google Calendar” and all events will show in your calendar in your local time, even though all times on the PA calendar are shown in Eastern Time. If you want to view full titles and additional information of calendar events, click on the Agenda Tab. Heather Sullivan created a comprehensive Events Calendar for New Jersey’s DEN, and it includes:

• Classroom 2.0 LIVE (in red)
• Future of Education (in green)
• EdTechTalk (in blue)
• OpenPD (in yellow).

So, if you are interested in adding any of these options to your calendar, you can import them easily. If your state Leadership Council does not have an events calendar, consider importing ours and perhaps customizing it with NJ.  Why reinvent the wheel.  Are you beginning to see why it just makes sense to use Google Calendar to organize your life. We hope you will continue to check what’s going on in the DEN as we update events. And if you haven’t yet ventured into syncing your life, professional and personal, on a Google calendar, you just might want to take the plunge.
DE Events
PA DE Events
NJ DE Events
Google Calendar
Jennifer Dorman
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Every so often you find the perfect post, the one you really wish you wrote that segues perfectly into a future initiative. Thanks to Angela Maiers’ twitt,

Perfect post to begin the conversation from @Langwitches The Need for Storytelling Skills

we have the perfect post to set up the first week of Discovery Education’s Back-to-School webinars, beginning August 3 with four days focusing on the art of digital storytelling. The Langwitches Blog has been a favorite of mine because it truly shows us “the magic of learning.” Their post on the need for digital storytelling speaks for itself:

Daniel Pink in “A Whole New Mind” describes how the need for storytelling skills in the information age has increased.

As information and

facts are  ubiquitous, nearly free and available at the speed of light […] What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.

Jason Ohler, in his book “Digital Storytelling in the Classroom“, talks about how stories

help us remember important information that might be forgotten if it’s delivered to us in the form of reports, lectures, or isolated bits of information.

Ohler sees storytelling as an information organizer.

we desperately need tools to navigate and coordinate the immense amount of information available to us.

Pink and Ohler are not the only ones putting information abundance and storytelling together.

Digitales- The Art of Telling Digital Stories :

Artificial intelligence research is showing that the more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. While storytelling does not replace analytical thinking, good stories do provide an essential process for conveying information in an easily absorbed form.
There is increasing urgency to develop communication skills that translate raw information into valuable knowledge for ourselves as well as others. Discovering the personal meanings of topics or events helps us create memory, meaning and understanding of the data and complexity in our lives.

Digital Storytelling – ISTE

The more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. It is the act of telling our personal story – of creating an emotional connection to information and experiences – sharing in story form what we know and understand from an event or topic that provides a “sense-making” process enabling our brains to organize a myriad of factoids.

Image by Will Lion

If we look at the above image that visualizes a quote from Mitchell Kapor:

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

It is easy to understand that we need to find a tool that allows us to channel the water, a tool that prevents us to waste all that precious water that is being squandered and not to be blown away by the pressure.

What if the skill of storytelling  can be the tool that helps us organize, remember and connect facts from the ocean of information that is coming out of that fire hydrant?

1. There is more INFORMATION out there than ever before in human history. We (and our students) need to learn how to find, evaluate and make sense out of all this information that we are bombarded with through many types of different media.
2. WHAT HAPPENS when we have obtained this/these  information/facts? What do we do with it? How will we remember? How will we archive for future retrieval?
   It is precisely THAT ability (organize/connect/remix/create) that we need to foster in ourselves and our students . The ability to put these facts in context. The amount of facts alone (without context)  just overwhelms us.
3. Storytelling (putting information in a narrative context) might be the answer to our need to make sense of this vast information that is available to us anytime, anywhere and anyhow.

If you are excited about digital storytelling, why not join us for Summer School with the DEN. Where else can you find timely professional development that is fun, fast, and free. Remember: 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.

21st Century Learning
21st Century Skills
Digital Storytelling
Langwitches
DE Summer School
Discovery Education
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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
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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
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Discovery Education always brings the cutting edge to the DEN before the edge is cut. That’s why I love the new Discovery logo. Although I think its reference is the new Discovery Student Adventures program, the catch phrase works for everything that Discovery does: they help us discover the undiscovered–ahead of everyone else. As they reshape the classroom of tomorrow via webinars, virtual conferences, global educational ventures, national networking, keynote speakers, innovative PBL, etexts and streaming (cornered the market on these latter two), they reconfigure our educational tools, and let’s face it, no one does it better.

So, why improve on perfection? Why make Discoverystreaming better? Because they can! And sometimes an answer is just that simple. Here’s your chance, now that you have registered for the DEN’s Summer School, to get a sneak peek at some summer enhancements to Discovery Education streaming. Register today for a Back-to-School Preview webinar to learn all about the new features and content coming our way this summer. Why do we love Discovery Education Streaming. Check out the cutting edge enhancements:

New organizations joining the 150+ publishers contributing to
Discovery Education services:

• National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
• More announced soon…

Current partners adding more content:

PBS Colman Communications Peer Power MarshMedia Aquarius Health Care Media Language Tree

Useful videos about financial literacy, and resources on Internet safety and cyberbullying are highlights from the hundreds of new titles being added to Discovery Education services for back-to-school.

Redefine the Meaning of Classroom

• Simplify your day and manage your classes with administrative tools that allow educators to assign Quizzes, Writing Prompts and Assignments to individual students or groups
• Students may access assignments from anywhere, anytime using their own unique student login.

Find What You Need, When You Need It

• Universal search through all services
  • Quickly find videos, virtual labs, reading passages, educator-created
    content, and other interactive resources based on the Discovery Education
    services to which you have access

Filter search results more effectively Refine your search results by popularity, a span of copyright dates, editable rights, and more Discover related resources to the videos you choose Quickly identify other similar titles when viewing instructional resources Scan for Teacher’s Guides, Blackline Masters, and other classroom resources Fresh, new search results interface allowing at-a-glance previewing of four times as many titles

• Flash video: Ease the management of classroom technology by supporting one file
  type for both Mac and Windows platforms
  • Provide improved video quality over streamed 256K WMV and MOV files with minimal impact to bandwidth

Take Learning to the Next Level with interactives available exclusively in Discovery Education streaming PLUS

Skill Builders - Harness the power of visualization and help students experience mathematics through Skill Builders that allow students to investigate the effects of changing variables. Over 100 Skill Builders spanning core subject areas get students engaged through hands-on experience. Games - Practice basic Language Arts and Mathematics skills through some of the over 100 games like Supernova Sentence Puzzles and Leon’s Math Dojo. Math Overviews and Explanations - Access thousands of self-paced tutorials that explain difficult-to-understand mathematics concepts. So there you have it–excellence in educational technology–leading the way in 21st century teaching and learning.

The lights are out, the students are gone, and except for the construction going on outside our west wing classrooms, it’s a quiet countdown to tomorrow–last day of school for teachers in our district. For some of you, vacation has already begun; for us, with the benefit of winter snow days, we are just ending later. With vacation barely begun for all of us, why should we get so excited about summer school? Simple: it’s the DEN’s summer school, with an action-packed exciting agenda for four weeks, each with a learning theme. It’s a carefully planned syllabus, with dual platform applications, as well as apps for Macs and PCs. So, tell a colleague, tell a teacher, tell an IT, tell a friend, invite your administrators, and join us everyday at 11 AM ET for summer school with the DEN.

Enroll today at: http://community.discoveryeducation.com/webinar.

Digital Storytelling Week
8/3/09
Thinking Outside the Slide: Creating non-linear PowerPoint presentations and learning centers with Discovery Education Media
8/4/09
Digital Storytelling Made Easy: Using Discovery Education Content with Animoto and PhotoStory
8/5/09
Director’s Cut: Discovery Education Media and MovieMaker (PC)
8/6/09
Director’s Cut: Discovery Education Media and iMovie (Mac)

Leadership Week
8/10/09
The Information Society is HERE: Are our schools up to the task? with Dr. Scott McLeod
8/11/09
Policies, Safety and Social Networking
8/12/09
Web 2.0 for Administrators and Others: Schools, Tools, and the 21st Century
8/13/09
Data-Driven Decisions with Discovery Education Assessment  (This is the week you really want to invite your Admin Team into Discovery Education webinars).

Science Week
8/17/09
Myth Busted: Easy Ways to Integrate Digital Media into Your Science Classroom
8/18/09
Getting Your Hands Dirty with Discovery Education Science
8/19/09
Differentiating Instruction with the Discovery Education Science Assessment Manager
8/20/09
More and Muir Tech Tips for Going Green

Web 2.0 Week
8/24/09
Get Your Glog On! The DE streaming Builders and Glogster
8/25/09
The Thread that Ties it All Together: Discovery Education Content and Voicethread
8/26/09
Two Roundtrip Tickets to Anywhere in the World: Designing Virtual Field Trips with Discovery Education Media and Google Earth
8/27/09
Learning Through the Funnies: Mixing Discovery Education Content with Free Comic Tools.

Enroll today!

Image Citations:

School House Animation: Welcome to School Animation. Discovery Education
(2009). Retrieved June 15, 2009, from Discovery Education: http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com/

Digital Storytelling: PhotoStory

Dr. Scott McLeod: Cable in the Classroom, June 2008

Discovery Science Logo

Web 2.0

It was a STAR-studded event last night as we unveiled our first-ever DENny Award Winners. Here they are in case you missed it.

Leaders of the Year

* Fred Delventhal, MD
* Teryl Magee, TN

Leadership

* Bridget Belardi, PA
* Tim Childers, TN
* Linda Rush, TX
* Susan Tompkins, LA

PL-DEN

* Lori Abrahams, IL
* Lee Kolbert, FL
* Anne Truger, IL

Legend

* Peggy Barger and Jim Hopton, PA (aka J-PEG)
* Carole Gooden, FL

Individual Blog

* Barbara DeSantis, NJ
* Heather Hurley, VA
* Maria Lourdes C. Angala, Washington, D.C.
* Tracy Standhart, NY
* Heather Sullivan, NJ

Leadership Council Blog

* Michigan
* New York
* North Carolina
* Pennsylvania
* Second Life
* Texas

Most Creative DEN Events

* CA LC – Grunion Run and KOCE Day of Discovery
* MO LC – DEN at the Roasterie and Fall in Love with Discovery
* TN LC – Best Buy on Digital Photography and A “Movie”ing Day on the TN River

DENthusiasm

* Jessica Donaldson, SC
* Genny Kahlweiss, CA
* Carolyn Rains, AL

STAR Power

* Matt Frey, Brevard County, FL

Educator Resources

* Traci Blazosky, PA
* Alexa Flores-Hull, AZ
* Emma Haygood, MI
* Lori Molt, KS
* Beth Weeks, TX

Community Choice

* Golden Sponge Award - Gail Braddock, TN
* Marvelous Media Specialist – Lynda Baker, MD
* STEM – Eileen Malick, VA
* Best Virtual Hair (Purple Category) – Nancy Sharoff, NY

DEN has outdone itself again, ending an amazing month with a stacked lineup of opportunities for its STARS. May 26 pitches a double-header: our last webinar of the school year, and the first-ever DENny Awards. We all know a STAR who has gone above and beyond for the DEN, or maybe we never forget to read a special STAR’s blog–every day. Why not take two minutes to recognize those STARs by completing the nomination form today. It’s due May 25, so you have today and tomorrow to nominate a fellow STAR. Then, on May 26, when we talk about all things DEN, we’ll also recognize some STARS who have shined extra brightly this year. Don’t forget to click here to register for our end-of-school-year webinar too.

The last Geocaching 101 webinar for the first-ever DEN National Geocaching Day is May 27 at 7 pm ET. You can register here to join one of our DEN geocaching experts as you get the basics of a tech-savvy treasure hunt. Check out the DEN National blog for resources and a list of a STAR Tech-Trek near you. And then, while you’re at it, join a group and have a great time, DENs way of saying thank you for a great year.  My first experience with geocaching was with Bridget Belardi after her presentation at DEN LC National Summer Institute last year.  I admit I was just a bit skeptical; it was hot and did I want to go on a techno-treasure hunt.  Let me tell you it is the most fun ever, so if you are just a tad like me and are wondering…just do it.  You’ll love it.  Promise.

Our good friends at Teach4Learning gave DEN STARS a great tool, Frames 4, during National DEN Teacher Appreciation Week. Now they have graciously offered us a webinar to teach us some tips and tricks using Frames. Join us this Friday, May 29 at 4:30 ET.

Learn how students can use the integrated drawing tools in Frames to illustrate their own stories, tell digital stories, and create animated Flash® movies.

To register, click here.

To wrap a great month, DEN ends with its first-ever National Geocaching Day on May 30. Don’t forget to check the national blog for STARS who are leading geocaching in their states.