DE Streamathon

Today, I had the unique experience of listening in on the Discovery Education Streamathon, a day filled with professional development and training sessions for using DE streaming (formally unitedstreaming, which I still refer to it as). I multi-tasked throughout the day, as I worked on finishing to put together the Smart Airliners my school bought and working on a few other projects, like my newsletter due tomorrow-(one more article to find) and listened in on the sessions.

The best one of the day by far, was presented by Steve Dembo, who talked about using DE streaming with web 2.0 tools. I got lots of great ideas and wanted to share those with you.

The first tool Steve talked about was Speechable.com. With this website, you can grab pictures out of unitedstreaming, upload them to the website and choose different speech bubbles to add to your picture. Once you've got your bubbles in the picture, you can save it as an image file (.jpeg) and use it anywhere...blog, PowerPoint, Word, etc. I thought this could be good to use with Social Studies. Take a picture of some event in history and add facts to it. Steve mentioned another great use about unitedstreaming...the pictures can be republished...no need to worry about copyright! :)

Next up is www.bighugelabs.com-what a cool site! There are so many things you can do with pictures here. Create historical trading cards (also great idea for study guides), motivational posters, like the ones from Franklin Covey. You can also choose several features, such as photo wall, billboard maker, pocket album. As I learn more about this site, I will come up with ideas for these features. I think this was the best tool featured!

Jump Cut was next. This is basically an online version of MovieMaker or iMovie, the benefit being that students can continue to work on their videos/movies after class time. I also liked that you can record audio in audacity and incorporate it into this too!

Cueprompter.com is awesome! I need to share this with my librarian, if she doesn't read it here first, but this website allows you to copy and paste text and then change the font size and then have it appear on the computer screen as if it's a teleprompter! What a great thing for morning announcements!

MovieMasher.com was next, but I feel like it might be something to Jump Cut. Some other websites suggested was onetruemedia.com and fixmymovie.com.

The last website I was able to see was glogster.com. Another great site! This one creates digital posters! Pictures can be enlarged when rolled over on by the mouse, facts can added, as well as, links and embedded videos. Saved posters can be used on blogs and wikis. Some examples shared were: thescientificshamrock.wikispaces.com, environmentalheroes.pbwiki.com/Jane+Goodall+per+1, and ktitraci.glogster.com/election.

So much to look at, but good ideas all!