NCCE 2010 -- Seattle -- Day 3

Session I -- Your Personal Magic Shop: 50 Ways to Use Discovery Education Streaming
The scheduled presenter was Hall Davidson but he apparently had to leave on a red-eye last night and Lindsay Hopkins, another Discovery Education Educator was there in his place.
She did the best she could to pinch hit for Hall. Discovery Education does indeed appear to be filled with a great deal of content with a big chunk of it coming (no surprise here) from the Discovery Channel and Network. Video, songs (450 "educational songs", .mp3 format, fully editable), sound effects (a ton), and images (over 20,000).
She also went on to talk about some non-Discovery sites such as Wordle and Blabberize among others.

Next came the keynote talk by Philippe Cousteau. Once again, a connection here is with Discovery Education. Philippe Cousteau. I believe his actual "position" with Discovery is: Animal Planet Chief Ocean Correspondent. It may go without saying that Mr. Cousteau is very charismatic and an extremely effective speaker. With his oceanic "calling card" it will also come as no surprise that his talk had an environmental focus with a great emphasis on how everything is so inter-connected. He clearly looked at all of us in the room and said that it's our responsibility to bring a strong awareness of the environment and the global responsibility to shepherd our Earth's future wisely. Another point he drove home is how everything we do is a choice, whether asking for "paper or plastic" at the supermarket or taking public transit instead of the car. I am not doing his talk justice here but I'll just reiterate that Mr. Cousteau was a terrific speaker and his talk was very well received.

(By the way, remembering that the theme of this year's NCCE was "Capture the Magic of Teaching and Learning", the warm-up act prior to Mr. Cousteau's keynote was an appearance by an honest-to-goodness magician. Unfortunately I've forgotten his name but he was very good!)

After lunch, I had my second three-hour workshop. The presenter was Jeff Miller. His topic was "Right-clicks, Tips & Tricks for Office 2007". I would have to admit being somewhat skeptical -- going into it -- that there could possibly be that many clicks/tricks/tips to occupy that much time. But, although there were a few "dry" spots, the number of things he showed us was 1) quite numerous, 2) appeared to offer many advantages of greater speed & efficiency, and 3) some were kinda amazing, as in "you can do *that* with a keyboard combo or right-click?" Jeff also provided a level of documentation that was both thorough and easy to understand and navigate. Plus he provided both a printed and electronic versions of all materials. He made it clear that these materials could freely be shared (with attribution, of course). Way too many tips/tricks to list here, but it was definitely worth the time.