I am also excited about Summer School with the DEN. Where else can you find timely professional development that is fun, fast, and free. Digital Storytelling Week kicks off August 3, with tools and trade secrets to get you to think outside the slide with storytelling made easy with Discovery Education Content, Animoto, and PhotoStory. Director’s Cut using Discovery Education Media and MovieMaker followed by Discovery Education Media and iMovie round off Week 1 of Digital Storytelling.

Week 2 Leadership opens August 10 with The Information Society is HERE: Are Our Schools Up to the Task? I have been reading Scott McLeod, J.D., Ph.D.’s blog Dangerously Irreverent ever since Christian Long wrote “The Future of Education Manifesto” and invited McLeod to mash it up. Responding to it became my English 10 mid-term exam, along with “Did You Know” from Karl Fisch. This keynote promises to bring an exciting beginning to the week. I wouldn’t miss this webinar for anything! Policies, Safety, and Social Networking is followed by Web 2.0 for Administrators and Others: Schools, Tools, and the 21st Century. Data-Driven Decisions with Discovery Education Assessment–love this newer offering and its related blog–The Dean’s List, authored by Porter Palmer (met her at LC Symposium and promise to write about her blog next) is a great finale to Leadership Week. If you can possibly leverage your administrative teams to participate, this week will definitely pay huge dividends to their educational learning communities.

August 17 opens Week 3, so get ready for Myth Busted: Easy Ways to Integrate Digital Media into your Science Classroom. I’m one of those people with an academic allergy to science, but I have been following Brad Fountain’s Science in Action, and he is definitely making me a believer with his weekly lessons (I am actually beginning to understand science). Now that you are getting into the swing of back-to-Discovery-School, you’re ready for Getting Your Hands Dirty with Discovery Education Science. Differentiating Instruction with Discovery Education Science Assessment Manager and More and Muir Tech Tips for Going Green round out a great week of science offerings. You can read about this finale for science week here.

Web 2.0 Week 4 premiers August 24. During this week you Get You Glog On! with The DE Streaming Builders and Glogster. Then, The Thread that Ties It All Together: Discovery Education Content and VoiceThread leads into Virtual Field Trips with Discovery Education Media and Google Earth. We end four weeks of learning on a fun note–Learning Through the Funnies: Mixing Discovery Education Content with Free Comic Tool.

I know that all of these wonderful webinars would be more than enough to rev us up for back to school, but this is Discovery, so there’s more. Between our wonderful partnerships with Mimeo and Scotch® Science Fair Central, teachers and instructional technologists have great new resources to bring to the classroom. You might want to check out Science Fair Central before Science Week debuts. And for those non-digital hands-on projects, don’t forget to put Scotch® Products on your students’ supply lists this fall. With items like Double Sided Tape, Precision Scissors and Removable Poster Tape, they’ll be well equipped for another year of science projects, posters, displays, and reports.

On a personal note, I would like to thank the DEN community’s huge support while I was hospitalized last week. Knowing how much I had your well wishes and prayers meant everything, so much gratitude from me to you. You are quite a learning community family.

DE Summer School
Discovery Education Streaming PLUS
MediaShare
Scotch® Science Fair Central
Mimeo
Scott McLeod
Turbo Tagger

Discovery Education streaming Plus is an absolute must-have tool to provide students with a richer, deeper understanding of topics under study. This is a great way to provide differentiated instruction, to allow for various styles of learning, and to enable students to become “eyewitnesses” to the events, places, things, and people studied in the classroom.

The flexibility of this resource can’t be topped. Educators can use an entire video or just a short segment to illustrate a point or to quickly demonstrate a concept. The latest version of streaming Plus provides two important features—the ability to differentiate instruction for ELL populations through the new world languages media and materials available in hard-to-find languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Arabic, as well as the opportunity to access comprehensive programming such as PBS productions, Planet Earth, Smash Lab, and more.

Discovery Education streaming Plus is a service that will enhance curriculum, meet standards, differentiate instruction, and—most importantly—expand the academic achievement of your students. Highly recommended.

To read the entire article, click here and register an account at MMIS, or download the PDF.