DEN Pre-NECC Extravaganza and 100th post?

So this is technically the 100th post to be on the blog, but that's with the automatic Diigo posts that happen everytime I find a new website to add to my bookmarks, so I'm not really counting this as my 100th post, but I thought it would still be nice to at least say I reached 100 posts in about a year and a half!

Yesterday, in preparation for my first National Educational Computing Conference (NECC), I attended the DEN Pre-NECC Extraganza at Discovery Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. Since I live close by, it was a no-brainer! What fun we had! We got to play "mock" school as we were students at Discovery School for the day. We had four periods, recess, and teams.

My first session was with Jen Dorman, where I learned about all thing "Ogs", as in Glogs, Blogs, and Vlogs. I've used Glogster before, but got to hear about more ways teachers are using it. Jen showed us several examples, and one on chromosomes and genes caught my attention. However, I did learn a great time saving tip: ADD IMAGES FROM THE WEB--You don't always have to download an image you like on the web and then re-upload into Glogster. You can use DE Streaming and search for pictures and choose a preview option (small, medium or large), which then opens the picture in another window in a web browser, with it's own URL! Copy the URL, go back to Glogster and paste it in the image from web box. The image goes right on your page.


Jen also shared a tip she used for class blogging, where she would assign a class scribe for each period and during the last three minutes of class, this person typed up what the class had done and posted it to the blog. What a great way for getting the students involved in communicating classwork! She also said the students would get very excited when they received comments from other teachers and the public! Jen was a high school teacher, so having the public comment would vary by school and grade level, but it was wonderful to hear how much the students wanted to keep learning because they were getting comments on their work. So instead of having students turn assignments in, have them publish it, and feedback from each other and the school community!

Vlogs are a great alternative to blogging. Jen also shared that some of her kids were downright scared to do writing assignments, but as soon as a camera was turned on, they'd start sharing like crazy! So in some cases, it might be easier to have kids articulating themselves in a "digital blog" instead of writing out the whole assignment.

The next session I did was, 50 Ways to Integrate DE Streaming, but it wasn't like the normal sessions on this, because there is a new updated version of DE streaming coming out very soon and we got to learn about the new features in this session with Jannita Demian. When you search for videos now, you will get results similar to how you did before, but now when you roll over a video you also get a pop up bubble (not window) with a 10 second video preview, with a description of the movie, teacher guides (this has great stuff) and in some cases a little box that says edit-which allows you to edit the movie. ANother change is the "Builders" have moved! They are no longer found in the Teacher Center as they've been upgraded to their own section. Look in the black box under the toolbar and you're find a link to them there. You can also check the "most popular" and "recently added" tabs for videos that fall into those categories. I also finally found the Discovery Atlas, which is in the Teacher Center. If you're a DEN member, you can check out these changes now.

There were some great ideas during this session: One teacher said she turns the volume off and has the kids narrate the video and uses this activity as a great assessment to see what they learned. Another idea was using PowerPoint and 6 or so pictures on a slide from a habitat/biome and connecting sounds from animals that would live in that type of environment and the kids have to identify what animal that is. When you click on the picture, you then get another slide with information about that animal. And all of this comes from DE Streaming!

My third session was on DE Streaming and Google Earth with Justin Karkow. I had gone to this same session at CRSTE with Jen Dorman and wasn't sure I was going to learn anything new, but I certainly did! I finally got Google Earth 5 to download on my computer and I was able to keep right up with Justin as he showed us the timeline and day and night features. The timeline allows you to look at a place through time and this icon, a clock, is found right under the toolbar. The day and night tool (there's probably an actual name for this) is right beside the clock and allows you to see the day and night views of a location. I liked Justin's math example as well. He would teach his students about measurement by taking a video from DE Streaming and embedding it into a placemark and then adding directions for what he wanted his students to do, and then the students would navigate to the placemark of a pyramid in Egypt and they would have to find the surface area of the pyramid. How fun does that sound?

The fourth session was our "assembly" time and I learned more about mediashare, which Star DEN members have access to. It seems like I need to check this out a bit more. I did use it briefly this spring when I was looking for video examples for a math film project I was doing with the 8th graders.

After "school" was over we celebrated the fourth birthday of the DEN. I had a great time yesterday and can't wait to see what awaits me this week at NECC!