Tennessee DEN

Plan on going to the Virtual Conference in Nashville on October 25th ?  You can now register to attend.  Space is limited, so sign up and confirm your spot early!Fill out the form at this site.  Be sure to list Nashville as your event location.Let’s fill it up! 

Registration begins today for locally hosted Discovery Education conferences around the country to be held on October 25th.  These conferences combine live workshops conducted by local trainers with online webinars led by the Discovery Educator Network Dream Team.Even if you can’t attend the local event, you can still attend the Virtual Conference online from the comfort of your own living room.  Below is a list of the online sessions.  All times are Eastern Standard: 

DEN Blog Network » Fall Virtual Conference via kwout

 The TN Leadership Council will host an event in Nashville at the Discovery Education Assessment Headquarters.  Watch this post for more information and a link to register for that location.

Last year’s online sessions were awesome.  This year promises to be even better! 

I am sitting in the meeting room of the Marriott, and it is nearly time for our second day to begin.  Before we get there, however, we need to cover some important news from last night.Several of us stayed until around 10:00 EST working on projects and picking up tech tricks from one another.  Afterward, a few of us wound up around a pool table.  I teamed up with Kristi Richburg for the first game.  My plan was to play a game or two and go to bed.  Fate, on the other hand, had other plans.  We played Justin and Teryl.  After winning handily, we turned our attention to Brad and Hall.  We could not lose.  Finally, our competition had enough and decided to play fooz ball.  If not for that, Kristi and I would probably still be playing and winning this morning.  Kristi was awesome!This morning we are going to hear from Sandra Ford with Discovery Assessment.  After that, Hall Davidson is doing our keynote.  Before we go home, our participants will demonstrate their projects for the group.  Another full day of fun with the 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

Get your Skype account up to date. Make sure the projector bulb is working properly. Plug in your speakers.  And then tune in here to register for the Discovery Stream-A-Thon!  That’s right, 12 hours of back-to-back professional development from some of your favorite Discovery Gang.Want to know who’s presenting (and when and about what)?  Check out the National Den Blog Post.  Sessions start at 9 AM and continue until 9 PM tonight.See you there!  

Wow! School has started.  No wait, the end of the first grading period is only one week away, and this is my first blog post of the school year! Yikes!  My most humble apologies.Here are a few things you need to put on your calendars for the upcoming weeks:EdTechConnect Webinar with Tim Magner from the Office of Educational Technology. The webinar will be held September 17th at 7 PM EST.  I had the pleasure of hearing Tim at the Adobe Breakfast at NECC this summer.  The webinar is sure to be a good one!  You can register here.The 2008 Stream-A-Thon is nearly upon us, too!  The 12-hour event will be held September 23rd from 9 AM to 9 PM.  This is a terrific professional development opportunity for your entire school.  Whenever teachers have a planning period, they can log in and gain great knowledge on a wide range of subjects.  Speakers include Hall Davidson and Lance Rougeux as well as the DEN Account Managers.  I will have this streaming in one of our computer labs all day for teachers at our school to come in and participate whenever they can. The Southern Regional Conference will be held in Huntsville, Alabama on October 3rd and 4th.  Members of the DEN from several states across the South will be attending.  Space is limited, so sign up quickly!  As soon as I have more information on the agenda, I’ll post it here.  You can see a list of all the Regional Conferences here.That’s it for now! 

Don’t be caught by surprise when school starts!  DE Streaming has been made bigger and better than ever, but it doesn’t come without some twists and turns along the way.

First of all, there are a LOT of videos that were added from shows you love.  For instance, the new, just-completed show “When We Left Earth” has many video segments added to DE Streaming.  In addition, the quality of the videos has improved (even older videos have new compression settings).

Second, there is now a classroom management area in the Teacher Center.  For the first time, your kids have access to DE Streaming through their own personal log-in!  Now, instead of assigning a code to every builder you create, your builders are stored in classrooms for kids with one log-in code to access them all.  Much smoother!

There are other improvements, but I’m not going to tackle them just yet.  For now, you may find parts of DE Streaming not cooperating with you.  Sit back.  Take a deep breath.  The tech department is aware of several bugs and glitches, and they are working hard to get them straightened out.

I will post some video tutorials a little later to this blog (when everthing seems to be working smoother).  In the meantime, there are some webinars scheduled hosted by Mike Bryant of Discovery.  You can check out his blog and webinar schedule here.

Let us know what you think of the changes!