The Tennessee Educational Technology Conference (TETC) will be held in Nashville, TN, from December 10 to 12 at the Nashville Convention Center. This year we have the wonderful opportunity to have THE Hall Davidson as a keynote speaker. Yes, the DEN’s original Rock Star will be our very special guest.In addition, I just received word that my presentation on Using Skype in the Classroom was accepted! Final details will be posted later. The DEN LC has more proposals awaiting approval as well, so look for those details at a later date.You can register for TETC here.
I just got this message from Scott Holcomb of the wonderful Memphis City Schools Technology Offices:
Calling all TN and surrounding area DEN educators!
Memphis City Schools is having their 14th Annual Educational Technology Conference November 6th – 7th, 2008 and we are looking for some exciting presenters and attendees! Click here to register!
This has been an awesome conference for Memphis City Schools and the surrounding areas. Our DEN STARs in Memphis are doing an awesome job providing quality materials for their teachers. If you don’t follow their blogs, head over to their blog site and RSS it right now!
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:
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!
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!
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….
Today, we leave for NECC in San Antonio, TX. Yes, that’s 16 hours from here. Some of the TN LC will pile into a car and drive as far as our little eyes and brains can stay alert, then spend the night and hit it again tomorrow. We will update this post often over the next several days, so check back at least daily.
Our itinerary includes a pre-conference event with the DEN. We will be at a working ranch for the day. No laptops we are told, but plenty of photo ops. Should be some interesting ones to add to the blog!
We also hope to meet face to face with dozens of people with whom we chat, blog, Skype, and Tweet. Of course, the multi-football field size exhibit hall alone is really worth the drive. Lots and lots of networking to be done at NECC!
Then there are the breakfasts, dinners, and other parties hosted by companies with whom we work at our schools. I will also be participating in a forum with Scholastic while at the conference.
Oh, and there are a few workshops going on, too. Check back soon!
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.
This weekend the TN DEN LC, along with our Discovery Rep Brad Fountain, presented a Day of Discovery at Woodland Middle School in Brentwood, TN. Despite our late efforts at getting the word out about this series of workshops, we had nearly 70 in attendance on a beautiful summer’s day! Many thanks to Mrs. Fizer and her fantastic support staff for their efforts in making this a remarkable day! Woodland Middle School is an awesome learning environment for both students and teachers. Thanks also to TAMS President-Elect, Jubal Yennie, for helping us find Woodland MS and working with us to integrate the Day of Discovery with the TAMS Summer Conference.
We were able to obtain a booth at TAMS to talk to people about the DEN and STAR membership. Teryl and I talked to several interested teachers throughout the morning. More staff development may be headed our way! Woohoo! Go DEN!
The TAMS workshop was not without its problems. We were scheduled to do a session on the 3 Builders in DE Streaming. However, the day before our presentation Discovery rolled out a brand new-and-improved builders’ site. Unfortunately, not all the links were working and the “My Content” folder had not been integrated into the changes. When you add to that the fact that the Franklin Marriott wanted $150 to put an Internet drop in the room and my Verizon USB modem connection kept disconnecting, the workshop was slightly less than stellar. The atttendees were very understanding and still seemed to get some things out of it that helped them.
Look for some training on the blog about the changes to the builders as the links improve. If you are responsible for training teachers at your school about all things Discovery, then you will want to plan some time to talk them through these changes. If you need someone to train in your district or at your school, leave us a comment at this blog and we’ll talk to you about what we can do to help.
As always, even with the minor glitches, Discovery Rocks! Thanks to everyone who helped make both days a success.
Via RSS
