A Day in the Life...

Sorry about the delay in my update today. It's not much of an update, unfortunately, as my allergies decided to rage again yesterday afternoon and evening and I didn't get to listen to the sessions as I'd intended.

The one session I really got to enjoy though was the Day in the Life of DE Streaming with Lance Rougeux, one of the DEN managers. His presentation was set up as if you were a student going through a day of school with DE Streaming in every class. We went from a mock setup of 7:30 in the morning down to about 2:30 in the afternoon. We started with Language Arts/English first and how to use DE Streaming with literature circles, guided reading groups, and writing prompts. More on this later.

Next we went to Math class and learned that DE Streaming also has some flash interactive games available. By using differentiation, teachers can have one group working on an activity and another group of students working at the interactive white board (iwb) with the flash activities. Lance also reminded us not to forget to use the curriculum standards when searching for resources, which is another good way to perform a search in DE Streaming.

Next we were off to Social Studies class. Lance showed us the Discovery Atlas in the teacher's center. This looks amazing, especially for Geography. Then we were shown how to take a DE Streaming video and add it to Google Earth. It's much easier than you would think. Streaming has a special new "share" button on the content pages of each video. Click on this button and copy the embed code. Then go into Google Earth, create a placemark and paste the embed code into the body of the placemark. Viola! When the students click on the placemark, they will see a link to the video.

In Science class, students would watch a video from Mythbusters and fill out a worksheet, making sure the busters followed the scientific method and steps in their experiments.

Finally, it was almost time to go, but not without homework! A new website from CDWG and Discovery Education will show teachers how to get over their fear technology. http://cdwg.discoveryeducation.com/web2.0 is especially for Technophobes, this website will be a guide to helping you integrate technology. So for homework, we need to try some of the strategies and report back. What do you think of this site?

I'll be bringing more later and the address with the archived sessions.