Today, Monday October 30th, was our first day of getting aquatinted for a three day Discovery Education event. Eleven educators from Oklahoma were selected from applications posted on the Enid Public Schools Technology website.

The doors opened for the event at 2:00 P.M. today as I met some very highly qualified teachers and administrators. Each of the selected participants was very excited to be a part of the Discovery Educator Network and had many positive comments about unitedstreaming and its impact on education.

During our first session each of the winning applicants wrote a short statement about why they wanted to be part of this in-service. Tomorrow we will post our first pod cast from their statements. I hope each of you will listen in to hear what they had to say. After a short orientation and introductions Field Manager Michelle Weeks joined us in a WebEx to review the DEN application process. Michelle did a great job and stressed the importance of getting involved to reach STAR status.

Tomorrow the group will create their first pod cast and join Marcus Hill, Discovery Educator in an avacast. Marcus will in-service the group on how to use the unitedstreaming teacher center as a resource to create lessons. The next item on tomorrow mornings agenda will be a two hour orientation on how to use student responders by Butch Holland from eInstruction. The afternoon will be spent planning lessons and practicing what we have learned.

Our first production using Free Play Music, Audacity, and Photo Story 3.   Today was the last day of our workshop and the group was introduced to Audacity, MovieMaker2 and SMARTBoards. - One of the lessons presented at the in-service was how to use Audacity to make a Pod Cast. During the activity participants were first asked to write some information about themselves and what they wanted to learn. They saved this information in their Discovery Project folder. During a break I downloaded this information on a thumb drive and created individual narrations for each participant to read into a microphone when arriving the next morning. We then used the individual recordings (sound files) and dropped them into Audacity.  This allowed me to demonstrate the use of the sound editing tools when making multiple layer soundtracks.  The end result was a sound track that could be used in a Pod Cast. Play It Here.

Another activity to demonstrate the use of sound FX was to create a video with music by using a second generation rendering process. The short video clip “Sounds of War” demonstrates how to add sound FX when using MovieMaker2. To get a second sound layer or track you would render your first video with music (“Sounds of War” First Generation WITHOUT Sound FX). Next you would import the first render back into MovieMaker2 to add your sound effects. “Sounds of War” Second Generation WITH Sound FX)   Putting It All Together with MovieMaker2 Read News Article