Tennessee DEN

Susan Tompkins and I (along with several others) visited Discovery’s local tech headquarters yesterday to shoot some green screen footage.  When we found out we wouldn’t get the “good” footage right away, I asked Howard Martin to video what we did with my little hand-held video camera.  The result is the ad below.  I’ve included a link to the original eHarmony ad so you can see how our ad came about.  My special thanks to Susan for a great script and idea!

The original video can be seen here

We’ll catch you up on all things LC Institute later.

Yesterday (Tuesday) was a whirlwind of activity at the LC Institute.  There were a total of 12 workshops offered by LC members.  Unfortunately, we could only attend 5.  Picking and choosing became quite difficult.

I took time to learn how to conduct a multitude of digital story types using both images and videos.  I also discovered how to combine the wonders of Blabberize with the “golden number” in math.  I learned some new things about Professional Learning Networks (PLNs), producing green screen effects in Adobe Premiere Elements (I need an upgrade!), and was informed of some really cool updates coming to the DEN blog site.

In a future post I will direct you to other blogs that cover some of the things I could not get to.

Last night was so much fun that I have lost the power cord to my laptop.  As a result, I can’t upload any pictures from yesterday because my battery is kaput.  Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to miss pictures from last night’s DEN Carnival!

Watch this space!

We arrived in Silver Spring around 11:30 AM and hurriedly threw our stuff into our hotel rooms and scurried over to the Discovery Headquarters for lunch.  Over the course of the next hour the vast majority of DEN LC members arrived.  We were immediately thrown into a group project (we love them!).  Our task? Create our own version of the Discovery “Boom-De-Yada” video that highlights what we love about the DEN.  We had two hours to write song lyrics, record video, take or download pictures, throw them all into the mix, edit, and produce our video.  No pressure, right?

In all, five videos were produced.  They were all excellent.  They were all different.  It made me realize once again that we cannot afford to pigeon-hole our kids into performing “one right answer” tasks.  When their imaginations are tasked their creativity compels them to make something totally different from their peers.  Each is great.  But enough of a soap box. Below is our team effort for Boom-De-Yada.  It is professionally amateurish.  We ran out of time before we could over dub voices at the beginning, so the silence you experience is not your computer.  Like Iron Man, don’t stop watching when the credits start to roll….

Teryl Magee and I had a fantastic time at NECC 2008.  We met a lot of people we have been sharing online with over the past year or more.  We also got to catch up with several of our DEN Member friends from around the country as well.  Oh yeah, there were some sessions going on, too.

I chose not to blog every little detail of our trip because so many people were blogging daily activities I felt it would be better for others to just read some of it there.  I know, that’s the slacker part of me coming through.

The Discovery Educator Network hosted a pre-conference event at a working ranch just outside of San Antonio.  We were kept in the dark as to our agenda, but it was worth the wait.  We were entertained by a cowboy trick roper (you must be good if you can do a handstand on the saddle of your horse and live to tell about it).  We got to see some of the cool stuff coming out in Discovery Streaming.  We watched the tech smackdown between Scott Kinney, Steve Dembo, Hall Davidson and more.  It was a lot of fun in the typical DEN style!

This was my second time at NECC, so I didn’t really know if I would be overwhelmed with it all like I was last year in Atlanta.  Turns out I was!  I spent much time in the exhibit hall, but I didn’t make it all the way through.  Of course, I was carrying my backpack with computer, camera, movie camera, and lots of free stuff from vendors, so the 90 pounds on my back sort of made me too tired to care after a while.

Teryl and I were invited to participate in focus groups for Scholastic and BrainPop.  I can’t say much about either one (or they may have to kill me), but trust me, you will like the stuff you see when it launches!

Night time entertainment was pretty good, too.  Several of the DEN met at Howl at the Moon.  That is a dueling piano bar.  If you’ve never been to one, put it on your bucket list.  It is the most fun I’ve had in a long, long time!  Our last night there Discovery hosted a party for about 400 of its closest friends.  Our good friend, Darcy White, let me tag along to the AZ DEN party and the Microsoft party that night as well.  Great networking opportunities as well as fantastic food!

I spent some time at the bloggers’ cafe, but the Internet connections were not that great.  Bud Hunt (BudtheTeacher in Twitter) did an impromptu session on Plurk (Twitter’s new arch rival), and it made me want to take a closer look at it.  Lisa Parisi did a live podcast from the cafe as well which was really cool to watch.

The highlight of the event sessions for me came from Hall “The Rock Star” Davidson.  He was in an auditorium that must have sat around 500 people on the main floor.  His session was pretty full.  Hall took us through all the useful ways cell phones can (and probably eventually will) be used in the classroom.  His PowerPoint is supposed to be available on the DEN Speakers site.  Great stuff!

All in all, it was a great time.  We’ve got a couple of weeks to rest up, then we are off to Silver Spring, MD, for the DEN LC Institute.  Woot!