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Last year, I wrote about some of the more underutilized features of Discovery Education Streaming . Part of the reason for teachers (understandably) deciding to not use the classroom manager and assignment builder tools was the cumbersome task of entering all of their student rosters. For this school year, Discovery made it convenient for schools to upload bulk users and automatically have them sorted into classes for each teacher account. For a quick look and review, follow me after the jump.

Image by big swift via Flickr As I'm engrossed in the NCAA March Madness, watching VCU take down the remaining #1 seed Kansas, I'm reminded of the Discovery Educator Network's own March Madness , hosted on Bracketeers. First of all, how cool is the site Bracketeers ? I could see teachers designing class projects where students create brackets related to subject matter - famous artists, writers, poets, chemical elements, biological species, even mathematical formulas. If students back up their reasoning for their seedings and matchups, one could imagine a reasonable bracket created for almost any topic, and with March Madness a yearly event that captures the attention of millions, why not offer a related tool to engage our students? There's still time to create a bracket, but onto the DEN's own competition and how my picks fared in the early matchups.

Ok, we've given a lot of love to Discovery Education Streaming (DES) this month, and rightfully so, perhaps. DES has a lot going for it, including a large collection of embeddable and downloadable video clips, a simple protocol for searching and organizing your content, and a feature rich quiz and assignment builder that links to students stored in your domain. This allows for numerous opportunities for individual learning, though a computer with an Internet connection is required. Would an iPad be a more convenient option? DES thinks so, especially with its newest web application .

Perhaps one of the more underutilized applications available at ETHS, Discovery Education Streaming offers over 80,000 embeddable and/or stand alone video clips for teachers to use, stream, and download through our servers. We last discussed how to begin taking advantage of the assignment, quiz, and writing prompt builder tools , and today, we'll dive into one of my personal favorites, the Atlas feature.

We're introduced Discovery Education Streaming (DES) and its huge library of video clips , and discussed how to search for and organize content related to your subject area . Now, we take a look at perhaps the most promising yet underutilized feature of the application. How does one weave some cohesion between video clips and better yet, assign them to individual students for completion and accountability? Say "hello" to M y Builder Tools.

In my overview  post on Discovery Education Streaming (DES), I discussed how to use the main homepage (My DE) to begin your search for relevant, engaging, and embeddable video content. However, as noted in the post, DES Streaming has over 80,000 videos and its supply increases daily. Today, we'll look at how to narrow down your search, how to save your discovered content, and discuss a few more ways to get the most out of this great resource.

Perhaps one of the more underutilized applications available at ETHS, Discovery Education Streaming (DES) offers over 80,000 embeddable and/or stand alone video clips for teachers to use, stream, and download through the cloud. In this series of posts, I'll take a closer look at a few different ways to maximize DES in your classes. Today's first post involves some general features of DES and how you can immediately get up and running.

During the last week before break, and fresh from my attendance at Google Teacher Academy, I decided to offer presentations and workshops for our faculty and staff during all three lunch periods. Details, links, and reflections for each workshop follow below, and all presentations can be found here . Monday, December 14, 2009 Tablet Training 101: At ETHS , we have rolled out 250+ Tablet PC's to our faculty. This year, English and World Languages teachers received tablets. I decided to focus this workshop on the basics of using a Tablet in class to ink on MS Word and MS PowerPoint files. Tuesday, December 15, 2009 SharePoint 101: During the past year, we have adopted MS SharePoint as the main vehicle for our teacher websites, displacing both Moodle and MS FrontPage . It has been one of my main responsibilities to help teachers learn and use SharePoint especially since our webmaster's departure earlier this year. This workshop focused on a brief discussion of ShareP...