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Last night was the DENny Awards 2012, the annual awards where the Discovery Educator Network and Discovery Education honor DEN members for their efforts throughout the years. It's the Oscars for us. In fact, the Discovery Education employees that ran the event were wearing tuxedo t-shirts!
You can view the entire thing, which was live streamed from Discovery Education HQ last night, below:
You can also check out some of the tweets from last night #DENnyawards.
I was honored to have won a DENny for "PL DEN", a play on PLN (personal learning network), for my work sharing and connecting with other educators about Discovery Education resources on social media and the DEN blog for the CT Leadership Council. I according to DEN, I've tweeted over 132 times sharing Discovery Ed resources and posted over 100 blog posts on the DEN Blog.
(I was also honored last year with a DENny for my contributions to the DEN blog. I'm truly humbled by the awards).
Connecticut had a good showing last night, with Howard Gunther winning a DENny for Best DEN Event for the SCICon Event held at the Mark Twain house and Joe Fromme, the CT Leadership Council's fearless leader, winning a DENny for Leadership. Lynn Reedy and I were also finalists to be DEN Guru's this year and, while we weren't selected, were both honored to be part of such a distinguished group of educators that were the 12 finalists.
It was a fun event and I love the people in the DEN and from Discovery Education that I get to work with.
Discovery Education and the Discovery Educator Network do so much for educators and education. They are a dedicated group of educators and professionals that work to support educators in their job of educating our youth.
The Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) Awards 2012 are here. The Google RISE awards promote and support STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and CS (Computer Science) education initiatives by awarding grants to organizations working with K-12 and Higher Ed students to provide enrichment programs in STEM and CS.
Awards range from $10,000 - $25,000 in the US and Canada and 500-10,000 EUR in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Ideal K-12 & university STEM programs and projects should:
Inspire excitement in STEM and CS
Improve, advance and enrich students' STEM and/or CS education
Include hands-on learning activities in STEM and/or CS education
Program Guidelines
Google RISE Awards are specific to STEM and CS educational and outreach programs
Applications are encouraged from organizations and educational institutions regardless of the socio-economic status of the students they serve
Please note that the RISE team is not able to provide one on one consultations during the review process (both prior to applying and after applications have been submitted) to ensure no bias is given to specific organizations
We will be asking for feedback and updates from the successful awardees to help us shape and develop the RISE Awards for future years
This is a great opportunity for groups that help students in STEM and CS topics to get additional funding to continue their work.
Share this with others and with any organizations that may be eligible to enter. Interested groups can sign up to be notified of the 2013 awards here: http://www.google.com/edu/rise/application.html
The 2010 Edublog Awards nomination process has started. This will be my second year participating in the nomination process. I find it difficult in many categories to pick just one site or blog, but I try to think of the ones that have affected me the most this year. I don't even nominate for each category because I may not know enough about a category to make a responsible choice.
Best Individual Blog: Jason T Bedell - Reflections on Teaching and Learning - Jason's blog has information and resources on Professional Development, student issues, pedagogy, and technology support. He has also hosted one Teachmeet last year and is hosting another this year.
Best Individual Tweeter: Steven Anderson@web20classroom Not only does Steven Tweet lots of great resources each day, he also coordinates other online projects and conferences.
Best Resource Sharing Blog:Cybrary Man's Educational Web Sites - Cybraryman has a great site with over 20,000 links to educational resources. The site is organized by Educators, Parents, Students and sub categories. He even has lists of educational hashtags for Twitter. It is an excellent site.
Most Influential Tweet/Series of Tweets / Tweet Based Discussion: #edchat - http://edupln.ning.com/group/edchat - #edchat is a great series of Tweets that educators use to connect with each other. On Tuesdays at 12noon EDT and 7pm EDT, teachers get together to discuss a specific topic, which they vote for on the site earlier in the week. Teachers also use the #edchat hash tag to search for great information, resources, and discussions on education outside of those two formal times.
Best School Administrator Blog: http://rebel6.blogspot.com/ - David Britten is a retired Army Colonel who is now a school superintendent. His blog offers tips, insight, and resources for educators. I truly enjoy reading his blog and have gotten some great ideas from him. Lifetime Achievement: Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne - an excellent blog with a ton of resources posted every week. He also has some really well done guide books (all free) for teachers.
MyAwardMaker is a free site with templates for certificates that you can download. They have a lot of different templates and they are organized by topic.
To create a certificate, you pick your template and then download it to your computer. You need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader (version 8.0 or later) to open the certificate. You can get Acrobat Reader HERE if you don't have it.
Once you open your certificate, you can then enter text into the open spaces and print it out. You can not save the certificate with the text added to it, but you can keep the template forever. You can also just print out the template and hand write the information.
Microsoft PowerPoint also has some certificate templates that you can use. You click on Design Templates and then go online. The site for the award templates is HERE. You then edit the slide and print it out.
I suggest printing them out on a color printer for best results and best appearance.
