Discovery Education is hosting two free, virtual professional development opportunities for educators and administrators this fall—the Fourth Annual streamathon and the Fall 2009 Virtual Conference. Focusing on how to incorporate digital content and the latest educational technologies into classroom instruction, both events showcase best practices and highlight new techniques attendees can apply to their classroom lessons to improve student achievement.

The Fourth Annual streamathon has been scheduled for Sept. 23, 2009, from 9 a.m. EST to 9 p.m. EST. During the 12-hour streamathon, Discovery Education experts will present a series of sessions specifically designed to help educators learn how to integrate Discovery Education digital resources into classroom instruction. Among the topics slated for presentation are an introduction to Discovery Education services, tips and tricks for integrating Discovery Education streaming content into science, social studies, language arts, and math curriculum, and strategies for increasing student engagement through the integration of Discovery Education’s digital media into classroom activities.

The streamathon provides school administrators, instructional technology specialists and professional development personnel new information about Discovery Education services they can incorporate into their own seminars, trainings and workshops.

In addition, educators worldwide are invited to join online and in-person on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2009, for the Fall 2009 Virtual Conference. This October’s virtual conference theme is Tech or Treat. The professional development seminars scheduled for this event will focus on providing attendees an overview of how Discovery Education content can be used in conjunction with the latest educational technologies including Audacity, Glogster, Google Earth, and other Web 2.0 applications.

The Fall 2009 Virtual Conference is scheduled to feature presentations from Discovery Education’s Online Community Manager, Steve Dembo, and Discovery Educator Network Manager, Justin Karkow. Both speakers will offer unique perspectives on how teachers can leverage the latest innovations in educational technology to heighten student participation in classroom lessons.

Both professional development opportunities are presented by the Discovery Educator Network (DEN), a community of more than 100,000 active educators supported by Discovery Education. Through the DEN, members have access to a wide range of technology training, as well as a resource library of teacher-generated projects and tools.

The streamathon and the Fall 2009 Virtual Conference will be delivered via the internet to attendees worldwide. Educators and administrators interested in joining any portion of the Fourth Annual streamathon should register at http://links.discoveryeducation.com/streamathon09. To register for the Fall 2009 virtual conference, interested attendees should visit http://links.discoveryeducation.com/virtualcon.

A big thanks to Randy Lindquist, Tech Director at MAISD, for this tip!

Cobocards, short for Collaborative Cards, is a free online tool that allows users to create virtual flash cards for whatever they need. After creating an account you can print them and study offline, edit them again and again, compare with older versions, check the status of your knowledge, upload pictures and graphs, share your flashcards with friends, set a deadline for exams – everything you can do with traditional flash cards – and more.

Create Flashcards
Create your own flashcards with two clicks. You can use different styles (bold, italic, red/green colour, underline). Add pictures to your cards easily.

Study Flashcards
You can study your cards alone or online with your friends. Just use Skype or the integrated chat functionality and see how easy it is.

Print Flashcards
Print individual flashcards or all of them in two steps and learn them offline wherever you are.

Work with a Team
You can comment on each flashcard, track the status of your knowledge, track changes, study online with friends and send messages to them.

Publish Flashcards
You can publish your flashcards. Everyone who receives the link to your cards can import them to their account.

Check out the Cobocards site for a virtual tour and find answers to FAQs on the Cobocards wiki. Developers have plans to introduce a professional version with more functionality for a small fee but say the basic version will always be free.

ARKive is a site with thousands of images and videos of endangered species, freely accessible to all online for private research and internal educational purposes. It has won numerous conservation, education and communication awards since its launch by Sir David Attenborough in 2003, and has now profiled over 2,500 of the world’s endangered species, using over 3,000 movie clips and 18,000 photos.

A section of the site ARKive Education provides educators with free downloadable multimedia resources including PowerPoint presentations and video files for the classroom, divided by grade level and curriculum topics, suitable for geography, biology, environmental education and citizenship lessons.

ARKive currently offers seven RSS feeds so that you can read the latest news in their newsletter, browse the latest images and videos uploaded to the site,  enjoy the photos in the Flickr ARKive group, view ARKive YouTube, or become a follower of their Twitter feed.

Finally, there is a Google Earth plug-in available so that you can use the ARKive layer in Google Earth.

Mac users know how easily you can use PhotoBooth to take fun, creative photos with the camera built into their laptops. If you don’t have a camera built into your computer (or if you don’t have a Mac), the next best thing is Cameroid. This online tool allows users to take photos using a webcam right in a browser.

There are a number of frames, scenes, and effects to use with the photos and Cameroid allows the user to download the images to their computer. Did I mention it’s free?

On the web site, Spelling City describes itself by claiming that it is an online spelling program that makes practicing for spelling tests fun. This is certainly true, and it is because of this that the site is quite valuable to teachers and parents. If the goal is to simple practice spelling, students can select from any number of existing lists on the site and then choose from Test Me, Teach Me, or Play a Game.

This tool becomes even more useful if a child’s spelling list is uploaded. This can be done by a parent, a teacher, or even the students. Once the list is uploaded, (after creating a free account) parents and students can access the list and practice their spelling at home. The practice and testing is worthwhile but the games are motivating

Frequently when I’m doing a workshop my participants need dummy text. In the past I’ve created a page of text for them to copy and paste. Last week one of the teachers in a workshop told me about the Lorem Ipsum Generator site for “Greeked”, or dummy text. They use it when they need text for his yearbook class.

On the site’s main page, you first input the number of paragraphs, sentences, or words you want. Next you choose the length of the sentences and/or paragraphs. Text can be displayed as a list or in html format. Finally, click the Generate button and your text is ready for you to copy and paste in your document. Quick and easy!!

If you teach Current Events, this online tool might be worth checking out.

TimeSpace: World by the Washington Post is an interactive map that allows you to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. Discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered. Use the timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, and customize your news searches to a particular day or specific hour. (Many Washington Post stories appear at midnight; others are published throughout the day as news happens). Click the ? in the upper right for help.

From the blog of Melanie Holtzman, “Once Upon a Teacher” -

“If you haven’t faced it yet, it’s time to take a good look at the students you’re teaching. Students sitting in classrooms today are members of the Eye Generation. These students are multi-taskers of their digital, visual tools such as cell phones, ipods, computers and television. They transition from tool to tool without interruption of thought passively taking in their environment’s visuals. These students need to be taught to critically examine the images they are encountering on a daily basis in order to come to important conclusions.”

Melanie’s friends at Stenhouse Publishers have invited the readers of Once Upon a Teacher to participate in a conversation with author, Johanna Riddle about her new book “Engaging the Eye Generation“. What an opportunity! Being able to ask Johanna something about her book or just about teaching visual literacy strategies. And she will answer! Let’s take advantage of it.

The conversation with Johanna will be posted on March 13th, so now is the time to visit Melanie’s blog and send her your questions, wonderings or reflections. Please use the comment section of Melanie’s post to let her know what you think. Melanie encourages, “Let’s dig in and really think about how we’re addressing the needs of our 21st Century Learners. Free learning, instant access to material and questions answered…what are you waiting for?!?”

You can get free access to Johanna’s book online here.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cataniamichele/2855661699

I’m in Chicago (St. Charles, Illinois to be exact) for the ICE (Illinois Computing Educators) Conference and all of the sessions so far have been winners! Dr. Yong Zhao (yes, Michigan’s Dr. Zhao) was their opening keynote. His presentation, “Never Send a Man to do a Machine’s Job: Reconstruct the Relationship between Teachers and Technology” was engaging and interesting. He had the standing room only crowd laughing thoughout his presentation. I’m hoping the ICE team has this archived for us.

One of the sessions I knew I couldn’t miss was Steve Dembo’s presentation “Extreme Makeover: Education Edition.” Steve will be doing a version of this at the MACUL conference in a couple of weeks. This session is really geared for Web 2.0 beginners although there were a couple of tools that were new to me

Many times when showing new tools to teachers, the response is, “I don’t have time to learn that” or “my district can’t afford any new technology” or “that’s too hard for me.” Steve showed several free tools that educators can use immediately, without the steep learning curve that accompanies a lot of software.

• Blabberize
• Edublogs
• crappygraphs (you might not be able to use this at school)
• Twitter
• Let Me Google That For You
• embedding video
• Plodt
• Poll Everywhere
• Prezi (You can apply for a free account but it’s in beta and might not get approved for a while.)

If you have a few minutes try these out. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see Steve share this at MACUL, I hear he’s looking for audience participation

A simple definition might be: Thinkfinity is a web site that provides FREE educational resources for everyone. As you explore the site however, you discover that it is much more than that.

The Verizon Foundation has partnered with 9 premier education organizations that produce discipline-specific, standards-based web sites that include lessons for teachers, activities to use in and out of the classroom, games for young children and teens, adult literacy resources and reference materials for anyone in the education field, as well as for parents and after-school practitioners. The Content Partners and their Thinkfinity web sites are:

• ARTSEDGE – John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
• EconEdLink – National Council on Economic Education
• EDSITEment – National Endowment for the Humanities
• Illuminations – The National Council for Teachers of Mathematics
• Literacy Network – American Library Association, National Center for Family Literacy, and ProLiteracy Worldwide
• ReadWriteThink – Internation Reading Association, The National Council or Teachers of English
• Science NetLinks – American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Smithsonian’s History Explorer – Smithsonian National Museum of American History
• Xpeditions – National Geographic Society

All of the content meets rigorous criteria including expert review and standards correlations by state agreements. The activities classroom ready for teachers and engaging for students.

The interface on the Thinkfinity home page makes it easy to search for the resources by key word, state standard, grade level, content partner, or resource type.