If you or your school system has access to Discovery Education, you should consider becoming a DEN (Discovery Educator Network) Star. As a DEN Star, Discovery Education gives you a space on their website for your own blog as well as access to support, resources, and professional development that are exclusive to DEN Stars.

I became a DEN Star last spring when I learned how simple the process was from one of the digital learning facilitators in my district. Essentially, you can go to the Discovery Educator Network link on www.discoveryeducation.com. Once you are there, you will read and watch a video that shares what the DEN Star program is all about. Then, you will be asked to host a Discovery Education event.

A Discovery Education event is sharing resources from Discovery Education with three or more educators. Events can be informal sharing sessions, PLC meetings, professional development sessions, or even webinars. For my event, I collaborated with a media specialist in my school to create a one-hour workshop called Technology Tools for Teaching and Learning. We demonstrated how to use Discovery Boards and shared some projects students had made with Discovery’s Board Builder. We also included some non-Discovery tools such as Quizlet, FlipSnack, and Padlet.  As a result of the workshop, many teachers began using Discovery’s Board Builder (as well as some of the other tools) with their students with great success!

To maintain DEN Star status, you must report two events a year. I have just begun to more deeply explore the resources that are available to me as a DEN Star, and they look promising! I certainly encourage you to host an event with some of your colleagues over the summer if you would like to check out the DEN Star resources before the new school year begins.