Tennessee DEN

This afternoon we took time to look at things other than DE Streaming.  Brad took us through some nifty tricks in PowerPoint.  My favorite was creating a scrolling bar across the bottom of a slide much like the news feeds you see on the cable news shows.  Very simple trick, but it will have your kids (and other teachers) guessing how you did it!  Another cool trick I noticed (but it was not commented on) was the use of a short DE Streaming video embedded as eye candy in a slide.  The audio was muted or removed and a very small version of the clip was inserted next to the next.  It simply played like an animated .GIF file.  Pretty nifty!  You can see his entire presentation on his Discovery Blog site.

Next up was Justin Karkow.  He took us through Photo Story, the moved to Movie Maker, and finally Adobe Premiere Elements to demonstrate how to use editable DE Streaming clips.  The presentation was topped off with a tag team preso with THE Hall Davidson on the use of green screen techniques.  Very quick, down and dirty, bare bones view of some really great tools.

Last, Hall showed a few quick Web 2.0 tools.  He demonstrated how to use VoiceThread, Google Languages, and Closed Captioning with DE Streaming.  With Google Languages, you can type a letter to the parents of an ESL student and then change it into their home language.  In addition, you can change an entire website into a foreign language.  Think about it.  Using Google Languages you can take your school’s website and create an identical version in Spanish, Portugese, Ukranian, Klingon (yes, that’s right!), and more.  Then, just add a link on your homepage to the link provided b Google.  I’ll have to do an entire post on the tricks we learned with Closed Captioning.

During dinner, we had a sharing time called Dinner and Dazzle.  Various participants showed off some of their favorite apps and sites.  One person won an iPod in her district for the creation of a Boom-De-Yada video with her elementary kids.  We looked at Wordle.  Did you ever think about creating your own wordle and using it to imprint t-shirts with slogans about your football or basketball team?  What about posters for class on the use of idioms?  I showed of Free Rice, Voki, and Pixlr. Teryl demonstrated KerPoof!  Brad talked about Go Animate (very easy animation site).  There were several others, but I wasn’t taking notes! Ack!

Tonight we’ve been working on projects. We’ll post more tomorrow.

Tim

OK, the first part of the first day is behind us.  Teryl Magee and I did about an hour and a half overview of DE Streaming and the 3 builders (well, 2 builders and an honorable mention).  Lots of folks here at the conference are fairly familiar with the streaming part of DE Streaming, but few had used the Builders up to this point.   Lots of great questions and some really good suggestions on ways to improve the experience.

At the end of our presentation, we left about twenty minutes for Brad Fountain to do a quick look at Discovery Science.  I have to say I absolutely LOVE Discovery Science.  The ability to do virtual experiments, have instructions read to struggling readers, and track student progress in the Classroom Manager is totally awesome!

After a full morning of instruction, we spent the afternoon at the Huntsville Space Museum.  I had never been here before.  We walked across the grounds, toured the museum, played in the gift shop, and then went to the teacher center and got tons and tons of free stuff!

We are now back at the Marriott.  Brad is going through a lot of cool stuff we can do with streaming media clips in PowerPoint.  I’ll post more later.

Tim

The long-awaited DEN Southern Regional Conference begins this morning.  Brad Fountain, Teryl Magee and I are working feverishly to get the room ready.  Well, OK, Teryl and I are surfing the net to make sure DE Streaming is working, and Brad is working feverishly to get the Internet connection and projector working.  The first participants should show up in about a half hour.

Teryl and I are going to spend some time going over the basics of DE Streaming and the 3 Builders.  After that, we will be all over the map looking at how to integrate Web 2.0 into DE Streaming and how to integrate DE Streaming into everything on the planet.

Throughout the day, I’ll post another short blog about what’s going on, so stay tuned!

Tim