ICT in my Classroom

In my science lesson this afternoon we used Google Earth, Google Docs and Twitter to help us get a better understanding about how day length varies across the UK, and an insight into the differences around the world.

As part of our introduction to the concept of day length I used Google Earth and the sun/shadow layer to illustrate the movement of the Earth’s shadow. We played the animation for the day and talked about what we could see in the way it moved.

What did Google Earth do to enhance the lesson?

• This tool allows you to control the Earth’s shadow – that is a powerful simulation in the context of this lesson.
• The timeline at the top of the screen shows accurate timing of where the sunrise/sunset is during a given 24 hours.
• You can play through 24 hours of sunlight and darkness in a matter of seconds.
• It offers children a global perspective on day and night – and yet in the same moment you could be focused in on your school and explore it on a more local level.
• If I was to continue this unit further I would consider a more prolonged and individual use of Google Earth and simple data sets of sunrise/set times. This would provide the children the link between the times and a visual representation of the Earth’s shadow.

In pairs the children worked in Google Docs on a set of sunrise and sunset times for UK cities. They used a simple formula to help them calculate the differences and so work out the day length in hours and minutes. They then looked at ordering the cities according to day length.

What did Google Docs do to enhance the lesson?

• The children were able to share document ownership of the day length calculations.
• Docs remembers to save the progress regularly – data loss is very rare.
• Children’s completed spreadsheets were “handed in” to me to review by sharing with me as a contact. The docs will then appear in my own list and I will get an email message too.
• I was able to model on a shared copy of the document displayed on everyone’s laptop screen. The changes that were made were updated in real time on their copy. When they went to make their own copy the modelled examples were part of their own.

As a longer extension to this task I asked on my Twitter network to provide some real locations for my children to research and find sunrise and sunset information for. 

I have used Twitter in a similar way in the past and once again I was thrilled to get so many responses that challenged my class. The locations were from right around the globe – India to Australia, from Thailand to Scotland. As an extension my class chose one or more of these locations as they appeared in my replies window on TweetDeck, and found out the day length.

What did Twitter do to enhance the lesson?

• Real data, from real people in real locations. I would just explain a little about the person Tweeting if I knew them. Real connections.
• Purposeful challenges from real people.
• It may only be a short 140 characters from those who contributed but it provided a hugely engaging task that made us think beyond our shores.
• I cannot think of any other tool that would allow me to connect to so many teachers so easily.
• The contributions were from so many different parts of the world that it provided us with day lengths that we could compare and contrast with our own. 
• The teachers that connected with us naturally asked other questions and challenges that allowed us to explore other things. 
• It provided the whole class an opportunity to think, if only for a few minutes, as global citizens.

It was an great hour or so and I believe the tools we chose to use to support our learning were the correct ones. I was of course pleased to see the children engaging with Google Docs so effortlessly, it is just part of what we do now.

Curiously Google have altered the process of creating a copy of a document, removing the “Copy Collaborators” step. This caused us no end of headaches when sharing a doc with many students, as they in turn copied the document and also the 60 collaborators. You can imagine the burgeoning number of copies! I hope our efforts to share what we did contributed in a small way to that development. 

Every teacher should use Twitter, not only as a networking tool to help them learn – but in regards to connecting to the wider world to support learning. It is easy, it is fast and in my opinion peerless. Thankyou to all of you who contributed to the lesson with your messages – I hope that this post provides a context for your contribution.

This afternoon we embarked upon the most challenging technology related work we have done to date in Year 5. The children are 4th graders, 9 or 10 years old.
Recently we all went to Perlethorpe Activity Centre to support our work on rivers – we measured the velocity and profile of the River Meden, as well as enjoying a lovely sunny walk around the grounds of Thoresby Hall. As we walked round I snapped away some pictures and this afternoon we had the opportunity to geotag them in Google Earth(GE).

The children have used GE many times already this year, so I decided to take advantage of this knowledge as opposed to using Google Maps or Quikmaps as I have done in the past. The geotagging work ties nicely into their ongoing map skills development and is a good conclusion to the visit.

This video clip is one of the children completing the process of embedding an image from Flickr into a GE placemark, using the correct written code. (<img src=”">)It certainly was a challenge for the children but once they had written the code a number of times, and often corrected their mistakes, they were flying.

Here is what you have seen Kyle do in a step by step guide.

1. Find an image stored somewhere online, study it carefully and try to pick up on any clues as to where it is. Remember when you geotag an image it should really be located where the photographer was standing when it was taken, not the subject of the image.
2. Copy the location or url of the image – in Firefox you can just right click and “Copy Image Location”. IE take the URL from “Properties”
3. Now navigate back to your new placemark in GE. Make sure you are looking at the properties window – you will add the code in the “description” part.
4. If you just paste the address it will not display the image because you have not told the map to retrieve anything, it will just return a link. You need to add in a little code.
5. All you need to do is ensure the image URL is encoded with the highlighted parts in the example below.
6. <img src=”alovelypicture.online.234.jpg“>
7. Now click OK. If you click on the placemark it should open up with the image inside.
8. When embedding video or other media – just look for the “Blog This” option, and paste the generated code straight into the placemark balloon. Google video can be added pretty easily in this way.

The visual / spatial skills needed to correctly place an image on a map is an interesting one to explore. The children were looking very closely at what clues the image revealed as to the exact whereabouts of it.

I told the children that they would have had a successful afternoon if they could embed just one image in a placemark at the correct location. But, just as they often do, the children ran with it and tagged many pictures correctly on the map. A challenging but ultimately successful afternoon of GE mapping work.

(I will add a link to some example KMZ work as well as a Google Map of our work from today when I can.)

I thought that I would reflect on what I have managed to do so far this half term with my class – it seems that we hit the ground running headlong into this web 2.0 thingy.

I have really enjoyed working with the children on the class blog – as one child said to me it gives them a voice. The sort of resources we have used are exciting and have minimal learning curves – they have been applying their ICT skills in real contexts. This is what it is all about (well to me anyway )

But I have also challenged the kids with stuff like embedding code into our wikispace – they have coped amazingly well.

So what have we done in the last 7 weeks:

Quikmaps - used this throughout our local history work, we basically geotagged old photos of the town. We added code to placemarks in Quikmaps, we then embedded the maps in our class wikispace. (Wow that sounds hard, but my Year 6’s did it)
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Bubblr - in our Literacy we took Matilda photos from our Flickr account and made a simple comic strip of them and added simple speech and thought bubbles. We embedded these in our wikispace too.
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Blogging - we started our class blog and the children have really enjoyed it. At least once a week I do a lunchtime blogging club so kids can get online and write / comment and visit other school’s blogs.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Wikispace - we have used this space to share our literacy writing and the work we have done in other subjects. I published the backing music for a song they were learning in music for example.
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Local Live – we used a shared collection to add points of interest around our town. This worked extremely well with one login too!
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Google Earth – This has been a regular feature of the half term and I am sure will continue to be. We have explored where news stories are from, visited Rome, Paris, London and Athens. We like to look at our Geovisitors and locate them on Google Earth. I have used Google Earth in my maths lessons.
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Mayomi - a lovely simple Flash based tool for mind mapping that we used to support our maths and literacy, easy to navigate and well presented. Cannot directly link to the map though when finished.
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Flickr - I have added photos, images and screen shots to our account and found it invaluable for the kids to make the most of some web 2.0 apps (like Bubblr) I have found the notes a simple success. ( I have also explored it as a photo resource for upcoming curriculum areas and it is amazing)
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Editgrid - we have set up an online space to share investigation results. Hopefully it will help the children better appreciate fair tests and reliability of results.
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…that’s not to mention using digital cameras to record our science and our SMARTBoard work.

So what is next – more of the same…?

I think I shall set myself some simple targets and you can hold me to these before Christmas (as long as Santa still comes )

• Continue to apply the successful applications across the curriculum I have already used, so they are not just one offs.
• Setup a session when the children moblog. (could be interesting!)
• Explore parental permissions so children can take more photos and blog with these.
• Setup a more structured daily blogging routine, children blogging in writing partners.
• Answer: does having a world wide audience / platform really make a difference to the standard of the children’s writing?
• Spread the word: get at least one other class in school blogging.
• Get the children writing with TiddlyWiki.
• Develop more international links via blogging etc.
• Do a simultaneous science experiment with another class somewhere in the world.
• Use Flickr notes more.
• Look into purchasing a cameraphone for blogging purposes. (Will I need to change blog hosts?)

So there we are some simple targets…well i will reiiew these again at Christmas.

Following a comment from Sally on the “My Quikmaps Lesson” post I thought I would quickly explain how to add images, video even Bubblr strips to a placemark.

1. So you have made a new map and you have added a placemark > What next?
2. Find an image stored somewhere online. For the images I used in my local history lesson I used our class Flickr account.
3. Copy the location or url of the image – in Firefox you can just right click and “Copy Image Location”.
4. Now navigate back to the placemark on your map. Make you have clicked on it to open up the balloon – and that the cursor is blinking at you in the space.
5. If you just paste the address it will not display the image because you have not told the map to retrieve anything. So you need to add in a little code.
6. All you need to do is ensure the URL is encoded with the highlighted parts in the example below.

   
   (No spaces between the = and the url)

7. Now close the balloon and click SAVE IT (bottom right hand corner) When viewing the saved map if you click on the placemark it should open up with an image inside.
8. When embedding video or other media – just look for the “Blog This” option, Gand paste the generated code straight into the placemark balloon. Google video can be added pretty easily in this way.

Hope this helps. Let me know how you get on.

Wow – what fun we had, this one really challenged the kids. Basically I wanted them to embed a historic photo of our town from Flickr into a Quikmap - they had to locate where to place the photo using some simple clues I gave them. A great Geography / History / ICT activity. Quikmaps seems to work differently in Internet Explorer then in Mozilla Firefox – in my class we use Firefox, but in the ICT suite we have IE installed, I might change that. The interface with the buttons seemed a little laggy and not as smooth and there were even problems with the appearance of the icon pallette.

The children soon managed very well and everyone used some code I had saved in a word document (like this] but I soon realised as I was explaining the above that we should take one thing at a time. So we just saved our maps – Quikmaps was obviously bombarded with maps in one account so struggled with the high traffic and I had a few Quikmaps – “OOPS APPLICATION ERROR” messages and was a bit concerned that the kids would lose there work. But they saved and as we used the back button and then saved again we had loads of duplicates. I contacted Ken over at Quikmaps and he said there were approx 54 maps from about 18 workstations!!, anyway we will be posting our maps up soon on the wiki so watch out.

They seem to do that a lot. I can’t help but think over a few ideas as I drift off to sleep and I was mulling over the use of old and new photographs that we have been doing in our local history. I wanted to explore the use of GPS and geotagging to help us locate some of the old pictures. Well basically what I have come up with is a conceivable set of Geography/History/ICT based activities that would be great to do.

You would need.

• GPS Receivers – hand held X 5 (one per group)
• Network copy of Robogeo (geotagging software)
• Digital cameras – X 5 (one per group)
• Copies of old photos laminated to be taken out with you
• Optional: portable mp3 recording equipment; iPod, iRiver

Prior to taking the children out you would need to locate whereabouts the old photographs have been taken and add these as placemarks into all 5 GPS devices – or you could just record the placemarks and ask the children to enter the lat and long as part of the task. (This task is assuming there has been some prior work using GPS devices within the school grounds for example)
So what would the task involve? I will break it into different steps. Essentially the main learning objective are

• To understand and recognise the changes that have occured over time to different locations in your local area.
• Use GPS and geotagging software to accurately locate the old photographs onto a modern day map.

The activities would be in this order:

1. Locate each GPS placemark and match it to one of the old photographs the children have with them.
2. At the exact location take an identical phtotgraph using the cameras – take time to frame the photograph exactly as the older one was taken.
3. (After completing all of the photographs) Return to an ICT suite connect both GPS device and camera to computer and load Robogeo software. Match up each placemark (lat and long) from GPS to the photographs. [This can be done for the new set of photographs as well as the older set.]
4. Export the finished work into many different formats: Google Earth, Google Maps, to flickr. Embed the map into a class wikispace.
5. An added feature of RoboGEO is the ability to associate an audio file with the image. The audio files could be recorded using an iPod or other mp3 device and loaded onto the PC as well.

The activities might need a bit of support but they are certainly not out of reach for upper KS2 children.I am not sure how many primary schools own there own GPS devices though!

RoboGeo is now part of my software list, I purchased the simple program to help me tag my photographs I take. During our trip to the Norfolk coast I took many photos and recorded the locations using my GPS as before. I then loaded the photos into RoboGeo and edited the Lat/Lon manually; this is pretty time consuming and I think I will be getting a upgrade on my GPS soon so that I can connect to my PC and take advantage of down/uploading files.

Once the information about the photographs location is completed you can export to Flickr / Google Maps / Google Earth. The latter creates KML or KMZ (if including the photos with the file) files and automatically opens in GE. There is even an option to plot a photo path or route; this adds a pathway in GE connecting your photo locations.

(The photo above shows the stamped data at the bottom)