Tennessee DEN

One of the blogs I follow regularly is Merl Evans’ Meryl.Net.  While she is celebrating 8 years of blogging, I’m really only celebrating several months of following!

I know how much DEN members love a party, so I thought I’d mention that Meryl is throwing one.  In celebration of the last 8 years, she is giving her blog readers a chance to win some pretty impressive prizes.

How do you win?  Well, you can check out the full details at this post.   Just to whet your whistle, let me list a few:

1. $800 DVD set from marketing extraordinaire Seth Godin.
2. $450 basic WordPress customization package from Kim Beasley.
3. Lifetime subscription for RadioTime.com RedButton software — TiVO for radio where you can pause and record live radio.
4. One full copy of Orchidia PC game from Joyboost. See Meryl’s Orchidia review.
5. One full copy of Spinword PC game from Joyboost.
6. One full copy of Astraware Classic Collection, which includes Astraware Sudoku, Astraware Solitaire, and Astraware Board games. Astraware is one of Meryl’s favorite — if not the best — developer of handheld software.
7. Ted Demopoulos: Two copies of Secrets of a Successful Blogging System digital audiobook with What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting (in which Meryl appears).

Oh yes, there are more available!  Nearly $5,000 worth of prizes in all.  Join the fun and register to win.  This blog is just one way I’ve registered.  Now on to more!

Every once in a while I run across something that just shouts, “Put this on the blog!” When I ran across a link to the Rapid E-Learning Blog, I heard that shrill scream in my ear again.

How many times have you looked and looked and looked for just the right clip art to put in a PowerPoint presentation? If you are cheap like me and don’t subscribe to paid photography sites, you probably lost count a long time ago.

So here’s a little secret I didn’t know: Using the graphics in Microsoft’s Clip Art Gallery, you can actually change the clip art to suit your needs. That’s right…change it to create something totally new that only you will use. In other words, every PowerPoint presentation you do can be uniquely yours!

Here is the gist of the idea. Most of the clipart in the gallery is a series of smaller, single graphic pieces that have been grouped to form one image. You can disassemble them by right clicking the graphic and selecting “ungroup” (some images require you to do this twice).

Once ungrouped, you can remove, edit, or add anything you like. I’ve included links to 3 posts about this subject. I recommend you read them all. Each has another piece of the puzzle to share. You can look for my own unique graphics the next time you see me present!

Little Known Ways to Create Your Own Graphics

What You Need To Know When Working With Grouped Clip Art

Create Custom Characters for Your E-Learning Scenarios

You can bet I’ve put this blog on my blog reader speed dial!

Eight technology educators from Memphis City Schools won first place at the Rich Media Impact Awards in Scholastic Achievement. The awards ceremony was held in Wisconsin. This year’s awards were sponsored by Sonic Foundry.

Sonic Foundry Announces Winners for Fourth Annual Rich Media Impact Awards at User Conference via kwout

You can check out some of their personal blogs about their achievement at these sites: Scott Holcomb, Jeff Baxter, and Felicia Fowler.

You can see more of what the Memphis City Schools tech gurus do with video here.

Here is something for teachers, students, and parents. Kids can earn a free book when they read 8 books over the summer. There is a short report to fill out on each book read. This is a great way to keep kids reading through the summer!

Yep, it is me again. I decided to slip away from the Discovery booth long enough to sit in on a session about Web 2.0. The presenters are Micki Daniel and Betsy Jones, both from the Knox County System.

For me, I’m learning how to use Safari on a Mac, so just picture the geeky guy from the commercials who only knows PCs and that’s me.

The website we jumped to first was here. Click on the Research link at the top of the page to find a LOT of alternative ways to search apart from Google. One of the most informative for me was Vivisimo. Vivisimo’s search results are “clustered” around sub-topics which makes it very helpful to drill down into results.

Next, the conversation jumped to wikis, blogs, and podcasts. We discussed wikipedia as a classroom research tool as well as personal and professional blogs and podcasts. They discussed free podcasts from university instructors and the need to meet students where they are. Classroom instruction is now available to download from iTunes. (While there was a lengthy discussion about the podcasts available for teachers from other sources, the need for teachers to podcast for themselves was not addressed). One specific recommendation was the Princeton Review Vocabulary Minute podcast.

Next, we turned our attention to resources that help us harness the power of Web 2.0. First up: Google Tools. Lots of questions about “why have a gmail account” and “Okay, I’m in Google Docs, now what.” This is a fantastic session for those just learning Web 2.0. The Knox County Tech department even has some in-service hours available on the web.

After Google Docs, we headed over to Go2Web20. This is one of my favorite sites ever! Our presenters demonstrated how to browse through Go2Web20 both by searches and the tag cloud.

All in all, this was a very informative session for those brand new to Web 2.0. From my history in other professional development settings, this is actually the largest group of teachers still out there.

I am truly glad I sat in on this session. I learned that Knox County has some terrific resources easily available for teachers, and the county has great teachers in the tech department ready and willing to help. They truly love what they do!Next year, Knox County will launch School Fusion allowing teachers to create their own webpages through the school tech services. Awesome! Session over. Back to the booth!

The DEN team is in Knoxville today at the ProjectGrad Teacher Retreat.  Teams of teachers from all the ProjectGrad schools in Knox County were invited to attend this all-day event to recognize and re-energize their “teacher batteries.”The morning started off with a great, full breakfast and coffee.  Then, each team presented their “team cheer” for the rest of the attendees.  It was great fun (and gave me an idea to offer to DEN retreats as well as our own academic and related arts teams at my school!).The opening speaker was Akil Marshall.  (Mr. Marshall is pictured with Karla Halcomb, our Events Coordinator).  The Akil Marshall Organization was established to communicate, motivate, and uplift those students who are labeled as disruptive, at risk, or unreachable.  Given his style and message, I would say that his organization does an outstanding job!His message centered on the belief that all children have “genius” inside them.  The influences from outside the classroom constantly bombard them with messages of failure and nothingness.  It is the job, the  mission, of educators to be heard above those messages as we tell children of their inner genius and show them how to let it out.During the keynote, I ustreamed the event and wound up in the chat room with someone I suspect was from Scandinavia.   The audio was horrible (a mistake I corrected in the last 5 minutes), so I wound up chatting Mr. Marshall’s main points and some of the PowerPoint slides he was using.  It was a great time of interaction as we talked about Mr. Marshall’s message and some of his metaphors:

Specifically, we talked about the metaphor of the massage therapist.  Our students are suffering from internal pain, but they have the power of healing inside themselves.  When our physical bodies are in pain through over exertion, a massage therapist can manipulate the muscles and tendons inside our bodies to bring relief.  The power to heal is in the muscles themselves, but the therapist knows how to manipulate them to heal.Likewise, students bring pain to the classroom (from home, peers, etc).  The teacher’s job is to manipulate the genius inside the student so the student can heal himself or herself.

Lars and I both thought that was a powerful metaphor, but also realized it would take a great deal of work to be that educator.What do you think?