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Matt’s Media Tips 2-13 Welcome to the Valentines edition of Matt’s Media Tips. And while I can’t promise you chocolates and roses, I can promise you some pretty sweet tips, tricks and a few bad puns. As always, I hope you find this information helpful and that you share it with those special someones. The Fabulous Five - Five Minute Preps Guaranteed to Make Your Heart Happy. Educators around the country have fallen for the Five Minute Preps within Discovery Education. Have you seen them? They are pretty delicious. The Five Minute Preps are designed to help educators teach a scientific concept and teachers around the country are using them in innovative ways. At an elementary/ primary level educators have used them as review before they begin to teach a concept. At the secondary level educators have incorporated them into their sub-plans. I have even seen them sent home to students to be worked on with parents as homework. There are 300+ Preps in Discovery Education Science Elementary and Middle and an additional 482 in Discovery Education Techbook. Each prep is available in two flavors (Flash or PPT) and each prep includes things like essential questions, common misconceptions, links to resources and a whole lot more. Sounds pretty sweet right? So now I bet you’re asking yourself how you can find your ultimate Prep match. Well my friends, it is pretty simple. Here are two simple ways to make your search come up roses. 1. Log into discoveryeducation.com and type in a search word that best meets your concept (“Cell
Theory, Newton’s Laws, etc.”) Then, on the left-hand side of your screen under the “Narrow My Search” column, you’ll see a bunch of different media types. Scroll down until you see Five Minute Preps. If you don’t see a Five Minute Prep listed, click on the “+ More” button to see the full list of media.
2. Click inside the white search bar area so that the Services/Media/Grade box drops down.
Then use the drop down Media box to find and choose 5-Minute Prep. It is the second item from the top (underneath “All Content”). Songs More Your Thing? Check Out This Confectionary Chorus Using the same search techniques listed above search for songs related to your keywords. Let’s stick with the teaching scientific concepts theme but this time use songs. Check out the song associated with Newton’s Laws - Lodge McCammon Songs: Newton's First Law with Velocity, Acceleration, and Momentum. This song is special because it is one of the songs featured in our student video challenge. By the way, if you haven’t done so already, you should absolutely register and take advantage of this contest! Not only will you have the chance to win great prizes like flip cameras and back packs, all of the songs associated with this challenge come with kinesthetic lectures. Check out the one that complements Newton’s Laws. A Picture Can Say 1000 Words But What If Others Could Comment On It? It seems as if Pinterest.com is getting a lot of buzz in the social media world. This being Matt’s Tips and Tricks, I wanted to check it out to see if I could put it to use in a classroom/lesson. If you’re not already familiar with this site, Pinterest allows you to upload pictures to create an online pin board. Your pictures become your “pins.” Other people can comment on your pins and repin them on their own boards. The site is very simple to use and and it has a mobile app as well. With that in mind I found a few pictures from Discovery Education that corresponded to the Water Cycle. I also copied the citations of these images into Word and made a screenshot of it thus turning my citations into an image. Once I had all of my material I uploaded it to Pinterest and added questions and text. If I had students I would have them respond to my questions using the comment feature. I would also encourage them to make their own pinboards to show that they have synthesized the concept. Here is a link to my Water Cycle Pinterest - I encourage all comments! Of course you could make all sorts of creative boards. For example; what about a timeline of Dr. Martin Luther King and some of his famous speeches and/or people he influenced? Or how about finding images that complement a reading assignment or a book that your class is reading? What about using Pinterest and Discovery Education images to incorporate into an ESL lesson or Foreign Language lesson? You are really only limited to you and your students’ imaginations!
Discovery Education Webinar Schedule
Coach’s Eye is another app that was shared with me by The Hall Davidson! The app was created for coaches to provide feedback to their athletes. But I think its features could also be used in the classroom. It allows you to annotate over video that you shoot live or edit video from your camera role. That in itself is cool. But Coach’s Eye takes it up a notch by giving you the ability to overlay your voice with its audio commenting feature. You can also slow down video and share your videos through their private cloud or YouTube. You can then share a link to your content via text message or email. Finally you can also save the video to the camera roll on your device. So how could you use it in the classroom? Well you could add Discovery Education videos to your camera role and then point out features that you want your students to observe (for example circling the different parts of a volcano). And since this app has a voice-over tool you could change the language by recording a voice-over in Spanish, French, etc. If your students are using iPads/iPhones they could explore this app’s functionality and create their own videos. For example, they could take their iPads/iPhones into a lab to record an experiment or use it on a field trip and become field journalists.
Dates
Time (EST)
2/13
4pm 5pm
I Luv Techbook: Parent Webinar. This session will give parents an overview of the Discovery Education Science Techbook.
2/13
7pm 8pm
Discovery Education Science 101. This webinar provides an overview of the Discovery Education Science for Elementary service. The webinar also shows you how to use assignment builders and assessments to guide and measure your students? understanding and mastery.
2/13
7pm 8pm
Encore Presentation - Overview of Discovery Education STREAMING. Back by popular demand this webinar had over 300 people attend! It will explore all you ever wanted to know about Discovery Education STREAMING.
2/14
4pm 5pm
Bridging Literacy and Science. This Webinar session focuses on resources, such as the reading passages and eBooks to increase science knowledge
2/15
4pm 5pm
ELL Strategies and Discovery Education Techbook. Leveraging the power and flexibility of digital resources, we'll look at a variety of instructional strategies to develop ELL students' holistic literacy skills
2/15
7pm 8pm
Engaging Students With Discovery Education. In this webinar, we will demonstrate new ways to deliver resources to motivate students, engage higher order thinking, and achieve curriculum learning goals with the support of the Discovery Education Classroom Manager and Assignment Manager.
2/16
7pm 8pm
STAR Techbook Webinar: Learning to Use the DIscovery Education Techbook Attendees will learn how to navigate the Discovery Education Science Techbook and integrate a diverse range of digital resources into their existing science lessons.
The app is $4.99 but well worth it.
Don’t forget to register and participate in the first student media contest of the year! Check out http://links.discoveryeducation.com/videochallenge
Link
Miss a week? Catch back up here! 2/6/2012
1/30/2012
1/23/2012
1/18/2012
1/9/2012
What did you say? Closed Captioning on an iPad? Getting Closed Captions to play on your iPad, GreenScreens on iPhone/iPad with GreenScreen FX app Let’s Give Them Something To Sing About Differentiated Instruction Using Songs, First Student Media Contest of the Year, ShowMe and Educreations Whiteboard Apps Meet the Faces of Discovery Education Get up close and personal with the Discovery Education on-air talent, special student webinar series, Story Kit app In a Class of Their Own Setting up Discovery Education Classrooms, Discovery Education Live Webinars, Quizlet App. Building out the New Year Five of my favorite things you can do with the Discovery Education Builders, Rover App for DE Students
12/19/2011
Special Holiday Edition 13 Tips from Educators around the US and Canada, Videolicious App
12/12/2011
50 Ways to Use Discovery Education Tips and tricks galore iSwifter App - Flash for iPads
11/28/2011
What I am Thankful for Building out your PLN Wordspree and Math Acorn Apps
11/14/2011
Things I Stole From the Community DEN Tips, Four really cool you can do with Google. TED and Animoto Apps
11/7/2011
First Six Weeks Aggregated
11/4/2011
Creating an “iCenter" How to create an ePub using DE videos. Spirit of Innovation Challenge
10/24/2011
Spooky Edition Digital Storytelling, Web 2.0 Piqua City Community Night, Crazy Pumpkin and Halloween Card Creator Apps
10/17/2011
Stick it to IT Collaborative Note Taking Site Educator Spotlight - Jennifer Everett, ToonTastic and PuppetPals Apps
10/3/2011
Opening Up Closed-Captions Closed-Captions for Macs and PCs, 10 FAQs Customer Service Receives
9/26/2011
Common Core, Web 2.0 and DE Three cool sites that integrate nicely with Discovery Education. Administrator Spotlight - Molly Hay!
9/13/2011
Can you Hear what I’m Writing? Embedding an eReader into your Writing Prompts, Getting to know Discovery Education SCIENCE
Help Me Make Matt’s Tips and Tricks Even Better I am always looking for ways to improve Matt’s Tips and Tricks and your feed back is invaluable to me. With that in mind I’ve created a short 10 question survey. I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts. If you can take a moment to fill out this super fast survey it will go a long way to making each edition better than the next!
What is a DEN Star Member?
The Discovery Educator Network (DEN) is a global community of educators passionate about teaching with digital media, sharing resources, collaborating, and networking. With over 100,000 members providing professional development to over 600,000 educators worldwide, the DEN connects teachers both on-line and in-person. Discovery Educators have exclusive access to a wide range of resources, professional development activities, networking opportunities, exclusive Discovery Educator events and more. Find out how you can be part of this dynamic and supportive community. Become a DEN Star today! DEN STARS GET COOL STUFF! We’re providing all DEN STARs with the DE Science Techbook for the rest of the school year! Get your free passcode by logging into the DEN Community page. To get you started we’re hosting a series of webinars to provide an overview of Discovery Education Science Techbook. At the end of February we will enter all of the attendees from the webinars into a drawing for an iPad 2. Find out more here on the DEN Blogs. DEN Summer Institute 2012 Get your cowboy boots ready! The DEN Summer Institute is heading to the wild, wild west. DENSI2012 will take place from July 21-26, 2012 in scenic Bozeman, MT. We really like giving stuff away so we’ve decided that we’re going to cover the airfare of three more DEN Stars who apply for DENSI 2012 by March 1, 2012. If you’ve already applied your name is in the hat! Find out more about this year’s institute and how to apply today!