Texas DEN

A great new initiative has been started as a result of a partnership between Discovery Communications, NSTA, and the Siemens Foundation. It is called the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge.

The initial launch of the challenge begins with middle school students competing in an environmental challenge - students identify a problem, research solutions, and offer their own idea of how to “change the world.” With this program, founders hope to promote sustainability and help students to realize they can make a difference in their world by coming up with and using ideas to live greener. Plans are to expand the program in 2009 to include all levels of K-12 students.

For more information, read the press release and/or visit the official Siemens We Can Change the World website.

I’ve received a request for a venue to make travel/lodging arrangements for the Regional Conference being held August 1-2 at Southern Methodist University. As a result, I’ve created a wiki for the Texas DEN to use. We’ll be able to use this wiki for many purposes, but for now, it is set up to be a place where you can list your contact information for other institute goers as well as indicate if you are looking for a roommate and/or a driving buddy.

Visit the wiki by clicking HERE. I’ve already added my information to get the list going. Let me know if you have any other requests for the wiki!

It’s been a couple of days since  I blogged. That’s because we’ve been so busy with activities and working on our projects. Yesterday, we got to go to a nice restaurant, Sequoia, near Georgetown, then we took an evening tour of Washington, DC. It was incredible seeing the monuments lit up with the moon to the side. The picture is of the entire group of us on the steps near Sequoia.

Today, we had a nearly free day of working on our projects. Early in the morning, I went with a group of people to Discovery studios where we got to work in front of a real green screen. It’ll be great to see all the great films and pictures that come from all of the studio time today.  The rest of the day was devoted to working on our projects until we were taken to the Discovery HD Theater for a special screening on a new BBC show. I will not give the specifics, but it looks like a great show!

Tomorrow, we will present our projects and be finished with this great week of collaboration, connection, and learning. Next week there will be another group of twice as many educators descending on Silver Spring. What will  they have to share? Stay tuned!

I’m sitting in a very active room full of educators on Day 3 of the DEN LC National Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland. Steve Dembo is the keynote speaker this morning. I’m embedding the live blog again today. It seemed to work great - if you can’t join the live session you can still read the archive from this post! CoverItLive is a great tool, although I’m thinking that, as a presenter, it’s going to take some getting used to because my audience will be looking like they aren’t paying attention as they quickly blog on the spot!

If you’d like to see the live blogs from other sessions yesterday, hop over to the Pennsylvania DEN blog (or visit other state blogs as well), and you’ll find the blogs from several sessions.

One of the things I have always said about the DEN is that when I’m given just 10 minutes in a room with DEN members, I come away with more valuable information and useful tools than I ever do in an entire day of professional development. Day 2 at the DEN LC National Institute proved to be an entire day of professional development that gave me the number of tools and ideas from those 10 minutes times 20. I am on overload! My list of tech tools to get is growing, my store of knowledge to apply to my lessons has increased, and I’m so excited to be here for a few more days!

I will dole out the ideas one or two at a time over the next few weeks so you won’t have to be overwhelmed as well. The tool I’m going to highlight today was one I learned about in Mike Bryant’s breakout session on Google Earth. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with Google Earth, but it is a fantastic tool that I’m going to keep my eye out for. It is called Eye-Fi. If you have a digital camera that uses an SD card, then this little gadget will work for you. Eye-Fi is an SD card that replaces your current card. When installed in your camera, it can automatically send any pictures you take to a Flickr, Picasa, or any other web-based picture storage account (you set it all up and tell it what to do). If you purchase one that has the geo-tagging feature, it can also automatically store the location in which the picture was taken and it is viewable in Google Earth.

The cost of these little 2 gig cards varies from $80 to $130 depending on whether you get one that geo-tags. As Mike Bryant said, “Imagine what the price will be next year”, speaking of the tendency of technology gadgets to drop in price over time. Put this on your “watch” list. I used Mike’s laptop yesterday afternoon during a presentation and got to see all the pictures he was taking throughout the institute downloading on to his computer as he took them. This is a really cool technology and one that has so many potential uses in both our personal and professional lives!

For those of you who are sitting at home, wishing you were here, Jennifer Dorman (cliotech) is live blogging Hall Davidson’s keynote this morning. You can watch the live feed here (and I think you’ll be able to see it later, as well). This is my first time embedding a live blog, so hopefully it will work!