Tennessee DEN

Today was our first Day of Discovery for Tennessee, and if the responses to our survey are any indication, it was a huge success.  We had nearly 30 teachers from varied backgrounds.  Elementary, middle, and high schools were present.  Mac and PC users were on hand.  unitedstreaming veterans and novices made their presence known.  The only problem?  Where were the guys?  I was the only male in a sea of women!

I’m not complaining, I’m just curious.  Next time, let’s get some male bonding going on!

Sally Walters started our day with an overview of unitedstreaming and the 3 builders.  Like so many people I talked with at the Discovery booth at NECC, the Teacher Center and Professional Development links are so often overlooked.  Many of our attendees did know now about these tools or had not spent much time there at all.

I did a whirlwind session on digital storytelling.  Several teachers were excited about the possibility of using this great tool to refocus their students’ energies and get them involved in higher level learning.

Teryl Magee and Karla Halcomb teamed up to present the many uses of Google Earth.  I learned a lot at that sessions myself.  However, we are loading Google Earth on all our lab computers this year, so I’ll get a workout down the road!

Teryl and Karla even put together a post-event survey in the Quiz Builder so all the teachers could get a chance to see what it would look like when they made assignments for this kids.  Way to go!

The biggest drawback came from not having computers available during the training sessions.  Due to room constraints, we had to wait until the afternoon to actually let our teachers get on the Macs and PCs.  However, it was a minor glitch to an otherwise stellar day!

I encourage all our attendees to post a comment to this blog and tell us about your day.  And watch the blog over the next few weeks as we plan for our next event in late August or early September.

On Thursday (tomorrow by today’s standards), the TN Leadership Council will host our first Day of Discovery in Knoxville, TN.  We have 30 excited teachers anxiously awaiting the doors to open and qualify for some of the best training anywhere (and door prizes).  That’s great news!  But even greater news is that we have 35 teachers on a waiting list for our next Day of Discovery!  How cool is that?

This week’s event will offer three workshops: 1) unitedstreaming and the 3 Builders, 2) Digital Storytelling, and 3) Google Earth.  The morning will consist of workshops with the afternoon devoted to project work in the lab.

I’ll post later about the possibilities of our next Day of Discovery in late August or early September.  We have some choices to make about how the day will play out.  We are pretty sure the location will be Chattanooga, so start thinking about taking a Saturday to join us!

I’ll see 30 of you on Thursday!

We began our day at NECC on Monday with a hunt for Bill Goodwin.  Getting his business card entered us in a drawing at dinner.

After that, Teryl and I headed off to the exhibit area in earnest.  We walked every square inch of the floor, looked at every booth, talked to some vendors, picked up a little information, and were ready for a break to work in the Discovery Booth by 2 PM!

While in the booth, we got to meet many of the 100 STAR DEN members wearing light blue shirts.  We also found out that nearly everyone we talked to subscribed to unitedstreaming at their schools, but many had never head of the DEN!  So we spent a great deal of time telling them about online collaboration, blogs, shared resources, training sessions, and life-long friendships that are formed within the DEN.  With eyes bright and their hands filled with DEN materials, these NECC-weary warriors marched off to fill out applications and join us!  What a great time!

We were able to steal a minute and grab a quick group picture to show off our lovely blue shirts.  Teryl and I were stopped several times by vendors and attendees alike to ask us about the Discovery Network.  These shirts were a great marketing tool that generated some buzz on the exhibit floor.

When the day was over, we headed over to dinner at Azio’s.  When the planning for this dinner began, it looked like there would be around 100 people (the same number as the shirts).  However, as with all things DEN, it began to take on a life of its own.  When the final tally was in, nearly 300 people crowded into Azio’s for the three "F’s" of teaching: food, fellowship, and fun!

After dinner was over, Scott premiered the green screen effects we had completed at Stone Mountain.  Then, we all entered into a scavenger hunt to find someone from each of the 50 states plus one international DEN member.  That entered everyone into a drawing for a new In-Focus projector!  Way cool!  Unfortunately, neither Teryl nor I won.

Keep checking back to the blog.  I’ll be posting some of the cool sites other DENners are using, and some really cool math stuff available from NASA!  Talk to you soon!

Teryl and I arrived at Stone Mountain this morning around 8:45, nearly 2 hours after leaving the comforts of Cleveland, TN.  We met up with the DEN members who arrived from the Omni and had a quick breakfast before jumping in to our first opening event.

Hall Davidson led is in an open sharing event.  Several DEN members demonstrated websites and projects that they and/or their students created.  We saw digital stories, websites, blogs, handy-dandy tools, and more.

Next, we jumped right into learning about Chroma Key and Green Screens and Adobe Premiere Elements.  Many had already used these tools, but some were "green" newbies.  It didn’t take long to figure out what to do.  Our leaders had already downloaded editible unitedstreaming clips, photos, and sound files for the project.  We had to choose at least one unitedstreaming video and place ourselves in the video using the green screen.  Of course, nothing could be that easy.  All pre-selected files were animal related!

We had 3 hours to choose a clip, create a storyboard, shoot video footage, edit files, and export a finished product.  As with any tech event, some had technical problems with computers and corrupted files.  Fortunately, Vanessa, Theresa, and me (my team) had no problems and were the first to finish!  I will post our work later.

For now, enjoy the slideshare below that depicts the first half of our day.  Next, we’re off to dinner and fun!

Thanks to Teryl Magee, we have uncovered this terrific opportunity to honor some really great teachers.  Read on!

The VFW’s National Citizenship Education Teachers’ Award recognizes the nation’s top elementary, junior high and high school teachers who teach citizenship education topics regularly and promote America’s history and traditions. Nearly 1,000 teachers are from every state, the District of Columbia and overseas. Fellow teachers, supervisors or other interested individuals can submit nominations by November 1 to your local Post.

To find out a Post in your area, contact your State Headquarters.

VFW’s National citizenship education teacher awards include:

The deadline is November 1.  Pick up a copy of the PDF brochure.  The VFW website is here.

This is not my day for Internet connections.  It took me 3 tries to get my last post blogged because I kept getting my wifi connection dropped.  Now I’m back at the hotel and it just happened again (always just as I am pressing "save" on this blog!).  So…let’s see if we can get this baby put to bed this time around!

This morning we spent an hour looking at Discovery’s presence in Second Life with Steve Dembo and the SL Leadership Council.  I have to say I was really impressed.  I can’t wait to get back in there and fly over to EduIsland II.  After looking around at our "headquarters," the council took Steve over to the Genome Project.  Using his SL avatar, Steve journeyed inside a 3-D cell.  How cool is that?

Our breakout sessions covered software and websites as we looked at a new beta product for Discovery, changes to the 3 Builders in unitedstreaming, and Web 2.0.  These sessions were led by Lance, Matt, and Steve.  We learned so much stuff that I can’t possibly list it all here.  I’ll do some follow-ups when the conference is over to let you know about some of the new things we covered.  In the meantime, Steve’s list of Web 2.0 sites can be found here.  It’s a wiki, so add your own!

We also spend some time after lunch with Shelly Santora Jones, the guru of all things unitedstreaming.  It is so neat to interact with these creative genuises!  You can look at the improvements to the 3 Builders at Matt’s blog.

Tonight, after dinner on the Discovery rooftop, everyone else went to Washington DC for a guided tour.  Me?  I had to finish a final exam, so I stayed behind (wipe a tear for me).  Now it is late, so I am going to copy this blog to the clipboard and try to post it again.  I dare the Internet gods to defy me this time!

Okay, it is right after lunch and we are in a great discussion about ways to make unitedstreaming better.  Lots of good ideas coming through.  If you have an idea, post your comment here.  The "powers that be" do check these blogs and may find your idea to be absolutely great!

In the meantime, here is a quick slideshow that demonstrates some of the stuff we’ve done in the last day.  Steve Dembo took us through the DEN’s presence on Second Life (great leadership council there!) and several Web 2.0 tools (more on those later).  Lance and Matt also took us through several good summertime ideas, including some cool work with a beta software used on PC tablets (more on that later, too!)

Okay, this is technically day 3, but I was too wiped out last night to post a blog.  Now, refreshed and fed, this is my third attempt to post this morning.  Discovery is a wonderful company with wonderful products, but their wireless connections…..

Anyway, we spent yesterday with Joe Brennan learning about digital storytelling, storyboarding, creating interesting camera angles, telling stories with no words, setting mood, using green scrreens, and (of course) doing the work.  I can’t post our team’s movie because we used a Beach Boys clip from YouTube that I’m sure is not copyright free.  Sorry!  Watch other blogs from around the country to see some of the other work that was created.  They were top notch!

Last night we spent time watching a preview, rough-cut, clip from a new episode of Predator Planet on the hammerhead shark.  WAY COOL!  The episode airs on August 1, so set your Tivos and VCRs.

Today is Web 2.0 with Steve Dembo as our opening act.  Then, we get our "big assignment".  Tell you more later!

After a long day of traveling through airports at Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Washington, along with a brief metro ride to Silver Spring, I arrived at the Discovery Headquarters (and more importantly my hotel!) just before lunch.  Since our schedule said to meet at 2:30, I had some time to walk the streets near the hotel and have lunch at McGinty’s.

I don’t want to give away too many particulars because the other two leadership events may follow a similar program.  Suffice it to say, you really do need to have Audacity (along with the LAME MP3 encoder) and Photo Story loaded on your PC (Macs can use Garageband and iMovie).  Take along microphones, headphones, mp3 players that record, a camera, and digital camera if you have one.  Yes, I had an entire backpack filled with tech tools in addition to my suitcase!

More important, perhaps, than the tech training is the formation of friendships.  I’m in a terrific working group with 4 women from various parts of the country.  Even during the after hours social time with ten or eleven or other STAR DEN members, the topic was almost exclusively about what we were doing with technology in our schools, what worked and what didn’t, and what websites our works are shown on so we can "borrow" each others’ work for ourselves.

As the week progresses, I’ll introduce you to some of the people I have met here.  Have a great day.  I know I will!

On a recent post at Teach42 by Steve Dembo, he mentioned an awesome new tool at Demofuse.  It is designed to give visitors a tour of your website, how to fill out forms, etc.

I think it is a cool tool for self-paced tutorials on subjects like Math, English, Science, and more.  I’ve just completed a basic introduction to the y-intercept form of the linear equation.  We teach this to our 8th grade students in our computer labs.  This is a first draft, so it needs to be tweaked. 

It takes a little time to think through how you want the web pages laid out, but now that it is done, feel free to link to it for your own classes and save yourself the trouble!

Let me know what you think and how you would improve itdf by leaving your comments below.

You can start the tutorial here.