ICT in my Classroom

I took these pictures in 5 minutes around my classroom during an afternoon of work last week. It was great to see so many different things going on in our learning environment. There are some great examples of artwork done by the class as well as a wonderful display created by our brilliant teaching assistant on James and Giant Peach.

Make sure you get a look at the laptop screens to see what the children are up to, what can you spot?

On Thursday I had the opportunity to head down to London to take part in the Amplified’08 event held at NESTA HQ. In addition I was grateful to also be able to attend the MIrandaMod2 unconference at the London Institute for Education.

Network of Networks

The amplification of voices is the intent for Amplified08. Voices that have already come together in their own social networks, to meet face to face and take the use of social media in their fields of work onto the next level. I was in the company of about 200 other professionals who passionately believe in the power of social media, in one form or another, to change what they do. I was pleased to meet Drew Buddie and Leon Cych and between us we flew the flag for education in amongst this wider group. 

The session topics were sketched out on the wiki and after a brief introduction by Toby Moores and NESTA we huddled around a whiteboard to find the location for the conversations. I attended a session called “From conscripts to followers – new forms of leadership and organization” that sprung up from a blog reaction by David Terrar to Seth Godin’s book Tribes. I listened to the group talk about current workforce models and how social media has a role to play, how communication streams are different then they were a year ago and how it is possible to utilise them.

I explained to the group that I work with 30 social media experts everyday and then said I was a primary school teacher and that the children were ten. I asked what will the large corporate world do when my class are ready to get into the workforce? I discussed some of the online tools we use and the fact we have a Nintendo Wii in the class and some of the ways we have already used it – I explained that when I talk to the children on their terms and engage with them in a place that they know and enjoy, there is an instant community of use. The children know that I am aware of the ways they use social media and other technologies – they appreciate that it is OK to talk about it and enjoy it.

As with many of these events, or certainly what TeachMeet was built upon, the corridor conversations were also amazingly valuable. After the session I talked with Graham Stewart, Euan Semple and Anne Marie McEwan about the future of Amplified and what might happen. I referred to the fact that I left Glasgow and the TeachMeet at the Scottish Learning Festival feeling inspired and empowered to organise an event of my own. We talked about the level playing field those who use social media are standing on – we can all publish, have a TV or radio station or be a journalist. 

I hope that in supporting each other social media and the wider use of online tools can be further leveraged in our professions. I believe that TeachMeet and the wider edtech community in all their glorious guises can exemplify how to use these tools in an open way. The way that we share how we work and our successes is not the same in the corporate arena. It was a privilege to encourage people to think about education in their discussions and all the good that goes on. May the voices of teachers continue to be heard loud and clear.

MirandaMod2

Drew Buddie encouraged me to attend the second unconference organised by MirandNet. It was a quick dash up the road with Drew from NESTA but was a real pleasure to attend and once again exciting to hear about the innovative work going on in classrooms. I was thrilled to also get a chance to meet Dai Barnes and Daniel Needlestone who I have enjoyed talking to in the EdTechRoundUp meetings.

Loosely organised but with a tighter rein then, say a TeachMeet, we had a range of speakers from across the education sector. Leon Cych was in charge of the video stream that went out on UStream and he monitored the chat and twitter feeds as well.

I had a little unplanned stint talking about multi-touch interactive devices and what the future may (already) hold for classroom technology. Rachel Jones the head of education at Steljes (who kindly supported the event with some money for the food and drink) spoke to the group about future classroom designs and how the SMART Table could play a part in collaborative learning. I look forward to working with Rachel in the near future to help ensure the most is made of the SMART Table and to explore the possibilities it and the Durham project brings to the classroom.

My planned talk to the group on the use of Google Earth for writing began with me tipping a laptop on it’s screen and sliding it underneath a visualiser. We had to improvise as my laptop would not connect to the projection system. I talked about the work we have been doing this week in class and how we used the visual support of a location in Google Earth to define our story. It was fun being able to talk and showcase what goes on in my class and another opportunity to reflect on my practice.

Dai Barnes took the floor and talked with great passion about his students work with Alice and Mindmeister - he also did an amazing impromptu demo of how to embed a Google Form in a Moodle page. After the event Leon, Dai, Drew and I had a pint and continued the conversation. Thankyou to MirandaNet for having me and it would be great to attend the next if I can.

Overall it was a great day of sessions, conversations and learning – there was so much to reflect upon and it was inspiring to meet my network face to face. It only serves to strengthen those connections and inspire you further.

We have had our Nintendo Wii in our class for about a week now and the children have been busy making their Mii avatars. They have truly engaged with it and seem to appreciate and understand the valuable role it can play in our class to have fun and support learning.

One idea I mentioned a few posts ago was that of using Wii Golf for addition, here are some more lucid thoughts and experiences of using it in the classroom.

Wii Golf Subtraction

We had 20 minutes at the end of the day so as whole class we talked about using Wii Golf to help with some subtraction work. The children have been doing the chunking division method (!) which requires them to use all four operations so more subtraction work was going to be valuable.

Pic: Look at Mii golf!

I started up a quick round of golf and took a shot. I was expecting to get some information about how far the ball had gone and then subtract this from the total yardage for the hole.

Hole Length – Shot length = Distance remaining

However when you have taken a shot in Wii Golf it displays how much further you have to go. There is no information about how far you have hit the ball. Consequently we had to change our sum and I asked the children about how we could work out the shot length – it was a good teaching point. The children at this point had their own small whiteboards to do work on. Our agreed sum for Wii Golf would be:

Hole Length – Distance remaining = Shot length

Soon the children were busy on their boards and were immediately totally engaged with the task. That comes as no surprise to me – about 95% of the class have a Wii at home, this is what they enjoy being engaged with. The shots will always be 3 digits or less and in that way are perfectly differentiated for my year group.

Wii Baseball Addition

Whilst the children were having a break time my teaching colleague Rick and I had a little play on Wii Baseball and soon more ideas for supporting maths were being batted (sorry) around. If you go to the Practice in Wii Sports and then Baseball you get the chance to hit 10 pitches – on screen you receive information about how far you have hit the ball in metres, perfect for generating addition sums.

Pic: Nintendo Wii Baseball

As a class I showed them what I wanted to do, hitting the ball and recording the length of the shot and then we worked on the addition to come up with the total metres. I asked children to come up and take 10 shots and we all then recorded as they went on our boards. If they didn’t hit the ball we just recorded the metres they did make. I soon discovered a baseball demon who hit about 6 home runs and 10 excellent shots. I asked the class to split the 10 numbers into two groups and then do 2 sums. Again the highest number was 187 metres, which is pretty good for a ten year old by the way, so the addition sums were ideally pitched to the Year 5 age group.

An added bonus was that after you have hit the ten shots the total length of the home runs are added up and displayed on the following screen. So if the children who were batting hit home runs we had to do a second calculation for home run length. i muted the projector display until we had done the calculation, modelled the work and then revealed the answer. 

As a whole class I was able to see on their whiteboard the work they had done and picked up quickly on errors with their method or setting out. However this could easily be done as a small group activity during a lesson. 

The children in that 20 minutes were happy, engaged, focused, on task and doing 3 digit subtraction and addition practice. It is important that we begin to realise the potential of these gaming platforms to support learning. I look forward to exploring more Nintendo Wii ideas soon.

In today’s literacy lesson, the third in our Google Earth storytelling unit, we made the leap from audio or spoken parts of the story to some written work. 

The use of the mapping in this story has provided us with a structure through the escape route we chose and also it has provided us with a rich visual stimulus for story content. The bushes James has to break through in his bid for freedom have caused scratches and bruises and ripped his clothing. The building site we have seen has caused James to be covered in dust and mud. In our story he hides between two large lorries and we stretched out with our senses (Jedi style!) and saw workmen chatting on a tea break, heard drills banging into the ground and the smell of diesel fumes from machinery. All of this has been generated from studying the satellite imagery in our story location.

Over the last few days we have been working on generating a bank of good vocabulary for the escape, which we have on our WOW WORD display. Through discussion and thesaurus work we have gathered lots of verbs and adjectives that have already proven valuable for the children to use in their stories. We have also tried to generate lots of different alternative sentence openers – many of the recorded audio sentences began with “I”. We used the verbs we had generated and coupled them with adverbs to generate powerful sentence openers. Again these are displayed on the wall for the children to see and use in their work, and in fact many of the improvements made today included many of the examples you can see.

Today the children used this language work to improve the sentences they had begun in their Vocaroo audio. Underneath the code for the Vocaroo player they added <p> for a paragraph and then wrote an improved version of their audio. We encourage them to make small changes to the original sentence, so just add a WOW word or begin the sentence in a more interesting way.

Here is an example of what one of the placemarks looked like and a second image of what the same item had included in the placemark properties. You can listen to the audio for this example here. The children coped well with writing in this way and had no problems with the coding as it is so simple.

The combination of audio and written text has allowed the children to really improve their writing. I have always been very encouraged when the children have used Voicethread and I think that a technology based audio element can be a powerful way to scaffold the writing process.

I believe that in this unit there have been a few ingredients that have contributed to improved storytelling:

• Google Earth’s imagery provided the class with ample inspiration for what to be creating in their story – they could see and explore it in front of them. They were not looking at a piece of paper and trying to drum up something.
• The confidence and comfort that they have with the main character and the background to the story.
• A clear and purposeful backbone to the tale – James is escaping.
• An agreed escape route. The whole class can then discuss the various moments in the escape. The sharing and peer support is vital.
• Easy audio recording has provided the children with a quick avenue into generating story content. There is no password/login/signup/complex method/knowledge/skill barrier to using Vocaroo. The children were recording their ideas immediately.
• Audio and text situated on the image at where it happens in the story brings, often disparate, storytelling elements together.

Photo by debaird
Attribution-ShareAlike License

In our writing sessions today I took both classes, all 60 Year 5 children, over two sessions and we continued and completed our work begun yesterday. The children were completing the task of adding 6 audio recordings to the correct placemarks in Google Earth, please see Part 2 for details of the process.

This post is concerned with some issues that have arisen from working with Google Earth and some classroom strategies I have found effective during my work with the application.

Consolidate

There is no better way for children to be successful then to have time to complete their tasks – today was a chance for them to consolidate the process they had begun yesterday and to once more practice embedding code in the Google Earth placemarks. All too often we want to rush the children onto the next great thing, it was useful today to take a breather and just ensure we had done a good job of the audio we worked on for our escape story.

Although a powerful and popular application, Google Earth is not used daily and so some children struggled to find their way around the different task panes and views. Having more time allowed them to become more confident. 

As both classes were running into difficulties about what they could or could not see. Often they would think that all of their work had gone, or it has just disappeared – when in fact the placemark had just been unchecked in the Places window. Today I consolidated their basic understanding of the task windows and how to switch between them. I demonstrated the different possible views you could have within the Places window – and pre-empted some of the possible problems based on situations that may or may not have already arisen. 

An issue that is well worth knowing about prior to working in Google Earth on a class laptop set is that of multiple content. For our escape story we have 7 placemarks and a path that loads up and is visible – when another child begins their own work another set of the placemarks is loaded up. Today some laptops had 3 sets visible. Children were saying they could not right click any of the placemarks but they had not realised (as the placemarks are identical) that there were multiple placemarks on top of each other. Again I reinforced checking only those placemarks which you need to be visible in the Places pane.

Empower

One of the disadvantages of working in Google Earth is that it is intended to work on a local level – as in the placemarks and items saved in My Places remain on that machine. This causes every laptop to have a different looking Google Earth Places pane, which naturally leads to some confusion. It is worth spending some time keeping on top of what files should and should not be there. My children would be using different laptops everyday and it is unfeasible to try and work with the same one everyday which would have been a time sapper of an organisational problem. Saving work is a little tricky due to the nested nature of the placemarks and content, however this is what we had to do.

I gave myself a good slice of time at the end of each session over the last few days to walkthrough the saving process with both classes.

1. Any opened work from a network drive will begin life in the Temporary Places folder.
2. Find the main folder for your work, all of your placemarks should be below it in a list. Select it.
3. Right click this main folder to bring up the sub-menu.
4. Click “Save to My Places”.
5. The folder moves up and out of Temporary Places.
6. Find the main folder for your work again. Select it.
7. Right click this main folder to bring up the sub-menu.
8. Click “Save as…” or “Save place as…”
9. Navigate to your network folder.
10. Name the file appropriately so you know what it is.
11. Save.
12. If saving over the top of previous work allow it to replace the older file.

Your talent scouting has hopefully provided you with a great location for your class narrative and perhaps you have even plotted the journey the main protagonists will take during the tale. What’s next? Today we continued our Google Earth storytelling as we added audio to the placemarks. 

In my opinion children’s writing, whether digital or otherwise, can be greatly improved through the use of purposeful  speaking and listening activities about the narrative prior to doing any individual work. Photostory and online resources like Voicethread provide us with a great set of tools to allow technology to further impact in this process. My aim in planning this unit was to include audio within the children’s Google Earth placemarks, I wanted their rehearsed, spoken parts of the story right in the place it happens.

Noel Jenkins must have been on my wavelength as at much the same time he posted on the excellent Digital Geography about the use of Vocaroo and audio notes in Google Earth. Vocaroo is simply ideal for classroom use and it could not be any easier to use. No login or sign-up, no profile or saved content – just hit record and then grab the code to embed elsewhere. Here is how to add audio to a GE placemark.

My class of 30 9/10 year olds went through this process today as we explored the 6 placemarks in the story we wanted to use for the story. I wanted to keep these the same for everyone so that we had some control over what people were doing and so that we could also share ideas amongst the class. They found the process simple, the audio is not great, but it is so easy to do it’s worth it. The Vocaroo site held up very well with 30 children working on it at much the same time.

It was a great lesson and the children will have some more time tomorrow refining their audio and perhaps adding a second piece of audio improving and building upon the sentences they did today. I worked with a small group of boys on a shared story – we had so much fun telling parts of the escape and adding chicken sound effects for the location in the last image above. I encourage you to give this a try and the clear potential for a huge variety of stories situated in Google Earth is boundless!

The next steps will be to refine some of the audio as I said and to begin to add some written text in the placemark that is scaffolded by the use of the Vocaroo recordings.

This is part 2 of a series of posts documenting our Google Earth Storytelling unit.

This is a series of posts about the use of Google Earth as a platform for my students to write. It was first inspired by the 21 Steps by Charles Cumming highlighted by Ewan McIntosh in a seminar at the Scottish Learning Festival.

For a while I have been keen to take advantage of, and further explore, Google Earth for writing and this series of posts will document the unit we are currently running in our classes which is a piece of a wider digital narrative jigsaw.

Be a Location Scout

I wanted to dispense with the written plan for this unit and begin with a location and journey that could be plotted on Google Earth. For a while I thought about coming up with a fictional context for our work but in the end I decided that the amount of work we had already done on Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach would give the children comfort and confidence. 

The first step is to find a suitable location in Google Earth for your writing context. I was looking for a house on a hill, near to the sea, that in the story was owned by Aunt Sponge and Spiker. It may feel like a needle in a haystack but really you are spoilt for choice! You have to become a location scout for your upcoming writing, and spending a little time finding the right place will pay dividends.

I soon decided that we were going to write the story of James escaping from his Aunts’ house and the surrounding area needed to provide a location for the story. I found a location with a small town at the foot of the hill and realised this was ideal. Take a look at the house in this Google Earth file.

This is the file I shared with my class – they opened it and explored the surrounding area for possible escape routes. We discussed as a class suitable hiding places: old buildings, bushes, cattle sheds. The children highlighted these on the SMARTBoard so we could share them as a class. With more built up areas the layers of information you can add in Google Earth could aid the children’s discovery of plot ideas.

It was important for me to continually bring it back to the fact that we are going to tell the story here, in Google Earth, this was our planning. We were exploring possible plot lines together and I would discuss possible sentences with the class – this helped them to focus on the escape story. The children responded really well to the visual, spatial idea for planning a story.

Plot Your Story’s Journey

The next step for us was to plot the escape route for James and I wanted the children to explore this themselves. After a brief demonstration of how to use the path tool in Google Earth the children went off and plotted ideas for escape routes on their laptops. It was liberating for the children to be planning their story in this way – I witnessed lots of speaking and listening as they talked through escape ideas and situations that might arise as the Aunts give chase.

To maintain a clear class focus we worked together to plot a journey from the house to James’ eventual escape. As we plotted the journey James would take on foot away from the house we made decisions on the fly about which way he would turn and which places he may stop and hide – all of the time picking up on ideas or locations the children recognised. The location was helping us define the story – the children were not just trying to dream something up.

A building site in the town offered us a great opportunity for escape and we even stopped and hunkered down between two parked lorries. I zoomed in and talked to the class about what they could imagine seeing and hearing – we spoke of the dust and mud on the large tyres and the sound of workmen nearby. All of which I hope will enrich their writing.

The building site led to an idea for his escape and as a class we decided that he would not continue on foot but conceal himself in a nearby lorry, which would eventually drive away from the Aunts and take him to safety in the next town. You can see the journey we plotted in this Google Earth file.

The children will now be adding audio to the journey and begin to talk through their escape stories. It is clear from this example that the opportunities for children’s fiction being inspired by and driven by a location is huge. It should be an interesting week of work with the class.

Miles Berry has emailed me about a short survey for students about their use of technology. Miles and Terry Freedman are running a seminar at BETT 2009 (as titled above) exploring children’s informal learning outside the classroom and what implications this might have for teachers and schools. For the seminar they will be discussing:

 a number of areas in which young people are using web-based and hand held tools for creativity and social networking across text, graphic, music, game and video media. 

As well as a literature review and some case studies, they have also put together a Google form that will allow them to collect some quantitative data of their own. I would encourage you to help Terry and Miles with their seminar by finding a little bit of time to allow your classes to contribute their thoughts.

I am delighted to get our Nintendo Wii installed and setup in our classroom. To get the audio working I used a small jack for the connections and ran it from the Wii into the PC’s Line In and then out again to speakers. We have one for each of the Year 5 and 6 classrooms. Not only will it obviously be lots of fun, I am hoping to make the most of the games to support learning. We have the Sports game and also Big Brain Academy which looks good. Soon I will take a closer look at BBA and see what more it has to offer in terms of classroom use, so look out for that soon.

Here is one sketchy idea already: Addition and Subtraction using Wii Golf (part of the Sports game) Use as a maths starter, an engaging way to generate whole class sums or even a small group activity – children take a shot, we subtract from the total yardage for that hole. Written addition of the yards for different shots. Total yards of shots around a short course. The yardage will only ever be into three digits for a single shot – unless I get a go and it will be less! Perfect 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction for the age group of our class.

So much more to explore!

Next week we will be getting the children creating their Mii avatars and I will try to find a way to export those images for use elsewhere. I wish that back when I was ten my classroom was this much fun.

For the first time in 2006 I saw a multi-touch device in action in the labs of Philips in Eindhoven. Just recently the wave of multi-touch devices has grown and this is especially clear in the use of mobile phones (also my iPod looks different). I suffered from iPhone envy when I was in Glasgow for the SLF as so many people had them, pinching and flicking their way through mobile content. A month or so after I returned from Eindhoven I wrote that perhaps the IWB had past it’s sell by date. What I am aware of now, that admittedly I wasn’t at the time of that post, is how much research and development needs to be done for multi-touch to be a strong enough technology for the average classroom.

Multi-touch technology in phones such as the iPhone, G1, Samsung Anycall SPH-M4650 and the new LG KF900 places it in the mainstream and can only accelerate the advancement of similar learning technologies.

The first consumer oriented multi-touch PC (ready for Windows 7) in the shape of the HP Touchsmart tx2 is available now and has a whole raft of gestures for the user to take advantage of:

SINGLE, DOUBLE TAP: Select objects by touching them once (single tap), or double tap to open objects/programs.

FLICK: Scroll or pan within an application either horizontally or vertically. For example, in MediaSmart Photo, flick your finger to the left on the display and the inertia from your flick will move the photos leftward, just as if you pushed a piece of paper to the left on a table.

PRESS & DRAG: Touch an object on the display and hold and drag it to the desired destination.

ARC: Allows you to move tracks to/from playlists without having to make a straight line.

PINCH: Touch an object on the display once to select the item then place 2 fingers on opposite corners of the object, then move them closer together to decrease the object’s size or to zoom out. Move fingers away from one another to enlarge the object or to zoom in.

ROTATE: Rotate photos by touching the object once to select the item then use 2 fingers on opposite corners of the image and rotate the image either clockwise or counter-clockwise.

LAUNCH MEDIASMART: Touch the screen with two fingers together and write the letter m on the display to launch the MediaSmart Smart Menu.

My involvement with Durham University has made me realise that multi-touch is still a fledgling in terms of mainstream classroom technology. They are at the very beginning of four years of research into what multi-touch means for the classroom, so I was surprised to see the SMART Table being released.

On one hand you have an expensive device available for the classroom now and on the other academics still trying to find the answers questions about multiple touch interactivity and how this impacts on collaborative learning and pedagogy. I hope that soon I will be able to see the SMART Table in action and perhaps sound out Steljes, the SMART distributor here in the UK, about the future of multi-touch and what they foresee,

I have had a SMARTBoard in my classroom for five years and I think that multi-touch devices will become a standard for mobile technology, more and more PCs will take advantage of it, to the benefit of future classroom technology. But what is beyond that? Will mainstream multi-touch devices just remain in the hands of our students and be brought into our schools? Will it take so long for all schools to actually be able to afford multi-touch devices that the next development for user/learner information interaction is already becoming a reality?

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.