July 14 – 18, 2008, Lee Kolbert (Palm Beach) and Cheryl Woolwine (Palatka) Florida DEN Stars, attended the DEN Leadership Council Institute, in Silver Spring MD. It was held in the Headquarters for Discovery Education. Once again Discovery out did itself. They treated us like royalty for 5 days. Food was awesome, lodging great, and the networking was the best ever. They always seem to know the right projects to get us to excel and share our techie knowledge. We started out Monday, creating our own version of the Discovery Channel commercial, Boom Di Yada – you can see our version here (South East) http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/tennessee, we only had about 2 hours to complete it. Tuesday was another busy day. Hall started us off with an awesome presentation on using cell phones. We took publicity pictures with Mr. Kinney on the 10^th floor, (for those of you that don’t know that is “SCOTT” to us).  The Den crew put on a carnival sideshow for us with prizes, cotton candy, and a beared woman. Wednesday came and we still did not stop; Steve Dembo’s presentation “Down the Rabbit Hole”, ways to communicate, ways we are doing it currently, and how we see presentations changing (streaming, back channeling, etc.), was ustreamed. Some of our own Den Star members put on presentations for us sharing new ideas, software and websites.  Discovery took us to dinner on the Potamac River – what a wonderful evening. After dinner we toured the monuments. Thursday the fun continued. We were able to visit DCTC and experience the green screen effect. Thursday evening after working all day on projects we had a screening of an upcoming discovery project on Comets. A pizza party followed then Guitar hero and other WII games on the big screen – a good time was had by all.

Friday we shared projects and were a little sad that our time together was coming to an end. We twittered and plurked and streamed and back channeled and …… and shared and shared and shared.

Oh I almost forgot they gave us stuff also. We received a T-shirt from Animal Planet, a polo leadership council shirt, USB hub (cool), and a green screen blanket.

I guess you could say it was a successful week  – it definitely did a lot to improve my Professional and Personal Learning Network.

Special Thanks to Lance, Matt, Steve, Juanita, Brad, Dennis, & Brian, and anyone else that made this week possible.

“I just got home from NY this past week….will share some of my NECC precon and NECC thoughts with you later today”