ICT in my Classroom

Google Squared is a product of Google Labs. It displays your search results in a grid format. Each item found for your search term populates the rows and their common attributes are shown in the columns. Rather then listing the web pages, your results are organised.

In my opinion it is vital that we don’t just assume that primary school children, who have grown up with “Google” as a verb, can search internet content effectively.

In July last year Google search engineers recorded 1 trillion unique URLs that they indexed, and that was more than a year ago. The amount of information at our pupil’s fingertips is amazing. Sometimes it is too much.

I think Google Squared is a great addition to classroom searching as it provides well needed structure to those search results. It doesn’t just provide a list of sites to click on but a grid of types of information. Google Squared is limited to the types of search terms that can be “Squared” but I think the added structure is a huge benefit to the experience of finding information.

For this post I have produced a series of screenshots and will highlight some of the unique features of searching internet content in this way to help you get the most from Google Squared in the classroom.

(The Flickr slideshow is best viewed in fullscreen)

Information Validity

When a cell isn’t populated with results it provides a great opportunity to explore and teach information validity. We not only need to help children develop their search skills to connect with information, we need to model and teach how to judge the quality of what we see. Just because it is online doesn’t mean it is any good, accurate or indeed useful.

With a regular Google search you will always get results. Using Google Squared often leaves you with gaps in the Square. This is a good thing. These gaps in the search results allow children the opportunity to make decisions about what should be included. We have been using Google Squared during our “Whale Week” and children had to engage much more directly with the information in these gaps, then they would with a regular Google search results.

One example that occurred in class last week was whether a Blue Whale would live for just 10 years or nearly 100 according to the Google Squared results. With some support we were able to see that most of the other values provided for whales were over 50 years and so we were able to define what was most appropriate. Another example was the length of one of the whales, which suggested it was over 100 metres! On closer inspection it showed we found it was referring to the USS Narwhal – a submarine!

Try this search for the wives of Henry VIII and see if you can spot the anomaly. These inaccuracies should be embraced as great opportunities to help illustrate information validity.

Measures

Although there is an option to automatically standardise the units of measurement in any given column – the maths that is involved to convert these would be a great activity.

A search for Bridges provides the ideal range of data for such a task. Children could change the Longest Span, Height or Total Length to KM or M. Other good examples include Cruise Ships, Skyscrapers and Super Cars (Super cars results all seem to be in millimetres which is great to do some conversion into centimetres and metres)

Building a Square

For the average classroom I think Google Squared provides a great opportunity to explore and learn about the very act of searching – not just viewing the results. Building a Square of results should be considered a learning outcome in it’s own right.

I think that this would be a great learning activity because of the way the children would have to engage with the validity of the results, the way it can be built from scratch and the choices a child would have to make to refine the accuracy of their work.

Your challenge today is to build me a Google Square showing me as much as you can about 3D Shapes.

More Search Ideas

The Google Search Curriculum provides lots of valuable resources for regular Google searches. It provides basic, intermediate and advanced lessons for three different modules:

• Understanding Search Engines
• Web Search Technique and Strategies
• Google Web Search Features

I believe that Google Squared would be a worthy addition to this “curriculum” because it is not only a search tool, it provides the structure and choice to help children become better at judging the quality of information online. Most importantly it allows children to directly interact with search results as they build their square.

Why not explore some alternative search engines for the classroom in this Interesting Ways to Use resource.

If you haven’t looked at Google Squared before I strongly recommend you take some time to explore it. I hope that some of the ideas and screenshots in this post give you some inspiration to use it with your own classes, let me know how it would be included in your work.

Back in October I wrote a proposal for the use of Google Docs (as part of Edu Apps) to deliver online reporting to parents at our school. The original blog post proved incredibly useful in sparking some debate about the use of such cloud based tools for reporting to parents. It also brought about some challenges and raised questions in the blog comments, again very useful to help me better understand the whole idea.

I have been exploring the resulting responses on and off for the last 9 months or so and this blog post is an update about the project and some information I have discovered along the way that may prove useful.

Just to cover some background once again, here in the UK the government is planning for real-time online reporting by the target year of 2010 for secondary schools and 2012 for all primary schools. According to the previous Schools Minister Jim Knight back in January ‘08:

Real time reporting will deepen the school-parent relations and is not a substitute for regular personal contact with teachers. Effective technology systems can actually significantly cut the staff workloads – but it has to be to be manageable for individual schools and meaningful for parents.

The aim is to develop a real-time reporting system that means parents will be able to access frequently updated information on children’s achievement, progress, attendance, behaviour and special needs wherever, whenever they want.

One of the very first things that people said would be a problem was the location of data centres and where the data is held according to EU law. The second issue that recently arose was the idea of two factor authentication for online reporting.

I have carefully explored and researched these two things and have summarised what I have found out below.
Where the data would be held. In the BECTA document “Keeping data secure safe and legal” it stipulates that organisations must:

Ensure that personal data is not exported outside the European Economic Area (EEA) unless EU Model Contracts or (BCRs) are in place.

However I discovered something called the Safe Harbour agreement which is intended to regulate the way personal data from the 15 EU states is exported and dealt with by US organisations. Safe Harbour ensures US companies can compete within these regulations and that they meet or exceed the stringent guidelines for data storage. This is not referred to in the BECTA document but in my opinion should be as it is a crucial. Google have signed this agreement and so it provides the opportunity to work with Google Docs within the guidelines of EU law and what BECTA have suggested.

Two Factor Authentication. Again from the same BECTA document it states that organisations must protect confidential information with two-factor authentication and some people have said to me that this is needed for online reporting, and as Google Docs does not have this it cannot be used. However I have found that:

The type and amount of data that will be made available online to parents is such that they should not need two-factor authentication for online reporting.

Taken from “Good practice in information handling: Secure remote access” BECTA. Although two-factor authentication may not be needed it is important to consider the types of data that will be included in the online report, this will need to be outlined with my headteacher as we work out the finer details.

Each of my pupils will have a personal login to Google Docs as part of our work in Year 5 which could be utilised for parents to access the report as well. In this way it will foster the sense of sharing the report between parent and child throughout the year. Generating logins for all of the parents may cause some issues with management and exceed the maximum number of users for the Google Ed Apps domain – but it is not out of the question. I am not certain which is the best option yet.

I am pretty confident from my research into these initial barriers that using Google Docs for online reporting is safe and within the guidelines set out by BECTA. Also contributing to this is further conversations I have had with representatives from Google and BECTA. I am yet to get a firm decision from my headteacher based upon the information, but I am hopeful of a full year long pilot beginning in the next academic year.

Alongside presenting my research to my headteacher I also offered three basic options for the layout and formatting of an online report using Google Docs. The structure of the three reports is similar in that they each have a space for the teacher, pupil and the parent to leave a remark or make a comment. I think this is important as it has the potential to build up a great dialogue about the pupil’s learning throughout the course of the year.

We have to make a decision about how the rest of the document will be organised and how the comments will be structured. Three possible ways include: based upon individual primary curriculum subjects, in much the same way the current end of year reports are organised. I have my doubts about just taking this old way of working because the way we are currently working is at odds to pigeon-holing learning neatly into subject labelled boxes. (Google Doc link)

The second possibility is using curriculum topics. We are moving to shorter curriculum topics for each half term next year in Year 5 and so there will be 6 different spaces for comments. As there would be no immediate distinction about subjects we may need to consider how clear the information is. I think this structure would provide parents with good signposts along the year as to what is going on in the classroom and also from a teacher’s point of view a simple structure to follow. (Google Doc link)

The last option was suggested by my headteacher, who said why not use the 6 areas of learning from the Rose Review. (Google Doc link)

• Understanding English, communication and languages;
• Mathematical understanding;
• Scientific and technological understanding;
• Human, social and environmental understanding;
• Understanding physical health and well-being;
• Understanding the arts and design.

This would be a bold move and would be a great opportunity to link up the assessment and reporting with what is going on in the curriculum. As a teacher it would make me look at what I am teaching in light of the 6 areas and engage with the concept on a much deeper level.

(Please be aware that these three Google Doc layouts are very much version 1.0 – I have yet to refine them, so go easy on me! But your comments and suggestions for improvements will be really useful to help shape what we might achieve with the docs.)

I have also added into the Google Docs above a simple mocked up comment to illustrate the idea about our healthy eating unit and some images that could be used as well. Nothing spectacular about that, but it would provide a simple way for such evidence to be linked with and sit directly alongside reporting to parents.

The last thing that I want to explore is the whole idea of the “report”. In my original post I said that perhaps we need to unlearn some things that have been in place for a long time. Certainly the whole concept of an end of year report is in danger of becoming defunct. The online version will allow parents access whenever they want to check on updates and progress throughout the year.

With this in mind my headteacher said to me on Friday that perhaps it may become a “conversation” rather than a “report”. I suppose he is right and that we all want to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with the families of the children in our care. Simply put, we know that more easily accessible information about what is going on in school will catalyse this. Does it need to always be very formalised? I no longer want it to be a case of me sitting down and writing some remarks at the end of a year and “reporting” to parents with a few days to go. The ongoing and timely nature of access will help improve communication and along with face to face meetings will keep the children’s learning at the centre of what we do.

The name “report” is contestable and you will see in the basic versions I have submitted in Google Doc form that I have used “portfolio” – which is the closest I can get to what I mean. It has the potential to be many things including that of showing off work to parents, but then maybe there are better platforms for that such as a pupil blog. Although not hugely important the name will set the tone for what is being attempted – a “report” is one way, whereas a “conversation” is a shared experience. Maybe a “Learning Conversation” is what is needed that allows pupil, parents and the teacher to share what is going on in the classroom, both the challenges and successes.

I believe that the research and exploration I have done (so far) does open the door to use Google Docs for online reporting, I feel confident that whatever decision we make as a school will be based upon the best information to hand. Importantly the use of Google Docs does allow us as a school to tailor the report to our exact needs, the needs of pur pupils and parents. Additionally it is free to use and online reporting with Google Ed Apps could be an important part of an open source virtual learning environment alternative.

Where we would be if say tomorrow you couldn’t access any of the tools provided by Google. None whatsoever, how would our classrooms change? How would our work as teachers be effected? Interesting thought eh? Obviously we would cope right?(!!!) But it certainly highlights how important the tools they provide are to the way we access and organise information and the way our children do the same.

In this post I wanted to quickly summarise some Google related developments that have caught my eye recently and may have an impact on the classroom.

Google Search Curriculum

This was announced during the recent NECC conference in Washington DC (Checkout these Google related presentations from the NECC conference). When I first saw this Tweeted I thought it would be a bit obvious, but clearly there is much more to it when teaching it in the classroom.

There are three modules covered: Understanding Search Engines, Web Search Technique and Strategies and Google Web Search Features. Each course has lesson plans that are detailed and differentiated: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced.

Furthermore the lesson plans provide a variety of links to specifically created presentations that support the lesson. For each lesson there is reference to the ISTE Standards for Pupil and Teacher. I have not used these before but they look straight forward enough and would be easy to tie into what is happening here in the UK, whether skills based or through the National Curriculum.

My Year 5 children are very good at using online resources to find information but I think that they could be much more adept. They could certainly cope with the the Advanced level lessons and I think there is lots to offer, especially in the third module about different types of searches as it doesn’t take much to scratch the surface beyond a basic keyword search.

They have been created by teachers and seem to be well worth a look and I hope to find some room next year to incorporate some of the ideas.

Apps Education Community

The support for Google Apps Ed users has finally graduated out of Google Groups and now has its own dedicated community space. (Powered by Google Sites of course) It is early days yet but they have currently added areas for:

Tutorials & Tips - “View videos and tutorials on how you can use Google Apps at your school and in the classroom. Have an idea? Submit your own tips & tricks!” Not much here at the moment other than existing Google tools videos. There is a link to a webinar about Ed Apps that goes into great detail about the tools and platform available. I think the idea is that users will begin to generate video content – maybe I should resurrect some of my ideas and stick them in a film!

Join the discussion – “Participate in the Community Forum by reading posts, asking questions, helping others, and choosing and sharing the best answers to your questions.”

Google Apps in Action – “Vote and submit on the best examples of using Google Apps in education.” An interesting concept using the Google Moderator tool. Submit an idea and then the community are meant to vote on it. Yet to see really whether it works, I suppose the better ideas will surface to the top.

Along with being able to add your own details to a map, you can also stay up to date with Ed Apps news and spread the word about the site.

One feature that is worth looking at is the Apps Lesson Plans, a link is provided on the left menu. Each lesson plan is linked to a Google tool if appropriate and although they may not all be appropriate for all age ranges, it is worth looking at some of the ideas and concepts explored. This will certainly help you to find the most appropriate ways to use the tools in the classroom.

After a brief Flashmeeting the other night with some other UK teachers, I have been excited to see the level of support that has been shown for a Google Teacher Academy in the UK. 

Currently you can add your name to a growing list (73 already signed up) in this Google Group. We don’t know whether we can convince Google to back a UK version of the GTA, but I think that we will be in a better position to go to them with that question if we can show support for the idea.

Last November I wrote about the idea and it is good to revisit it, as I have experienced the ways Google tools can impact on learning in the classroom. Let’s hope that if we continue to show support for the idea that a better platform for sharing and celebrating our experiences can develop, whether that’s a Google Teacher Academy or otherwise.

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.

I have followed the last 3 Google Teacher Academies from afar and as I currently write this the New York event is in full swing. They always sound like positive experiences for all who have been involved and I am very grateful that the work in our school has been featured at both the Chicago and the New York events.

Although I am pleased to see references to the resources and work I have been doing, I’d much prefer the opportunity to talk to fellow teachers about it myself. I would greatly value the opportunity to spend time with 50 other teachers from across the UK and Europe, talking about the powerful tools that Google offers, the ways they impact on learning and the innovative classroom approaches it can open up. Chewing over ideas for the implementation of Google tools to support learning would be a great way to spend a day.

You may ask: why have I not applied for any of the academy events as they accept international teachers? Put simply it is the cost of travel that is completely prohibitive to me or many other teachers even applying. Most schools would (a) not be able to help with the cost of international travel / accommodation and (b) incur more costs due to the extended absence from a classroom.

That is why I am calling on Google to hold a Teacher Academy event in the UK.

A London based event would allow UK and European based teachers the opportunity to gather together and participate by sharing their ideas and experiences of Google tools in the same way our US colleagues have done. In my opinion there is highly innovative practice in the UK with educational technology in the classroom – you only have to look at the TeachMeet events and some of the topics presented. 

50 certified trainers in the UK and Europe taking innovative ideas with them back to their schools, districts and counties would help other teachers to begin to better understand Google tools and the potential they have. Admittedly Google tools are not the only thing available, but in my opinion used in the right way they hold a strong place in any classroom toolkit.

I know it sounds like sour grapes but I genuinely think it is time that the innovative work with Google tools by so many UK educators is celebrated, championed and recognised.

Do you think a GTA should be held in the UK? What can I/we do to help bring the Google Teacher Academy to these shores?

London to NYC: Swim the Atlantic…

Over the last few weeks we have been working with the poem The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. We have been discussing and exploring it through lots of talk and drama. On Monday we talked as a class about the drama technique of hot-seating, I asked the children to work with a partner to prepare some questions they might ask the Highwayman if they had the chance. As they were working I wandered out of the class and immediately returned into the room, but this time I tiptoed in and asked one of the children, in a whispery voice, whether it was safe or not. They looked bemused and I crept through the rest of the class shiftily looking from side to side. I had become the Highwayman. 

I have always enjoyed drama as a way into text and the children love it when their teacher goes out on a limb a little and pretends. I told the children that I didn’t have much time and that I had gotten their message about meeting them here. We had a series of questions about the plot, the character’s feelings about Bess and what it was like to be a criminal. All the time I was checking through the blinds and looking suspiciously at the kids. When my time was up I acted as if the paranoia had got to me and I accused the children of setting me up – that it was a trap and I with one more furtive glance I dashed off out the door again. When I returned we were all smiling. (The children went on to do hot-seating in smaller groups.)

In the following lesson we used a Voicethread to further explore the characters in the poem. (Each child had their own laptop in this session.) I asked the children to add voice and text (I always give them the choice) comments on the various character images I had uploaded. I prompted them to make these kinds of comments:

• Questions that they might like to ask the characters. Consolidating the previous drama work.
• Answer a question that they see from someone else. Take on the character’s role and answer a question posed by other people in the class.
• General reactions and thoughts on the different characters in the poem.

Last year it was in the Summer term that I finally got my act together and began using more cloud based computing and relying less and less on my memory stick. This year has started with barely a shred of paper in sight and I actually do not know where my memory stick is. I have been pleased to see that Google Docs is beginning to deal with imported Word files containing tables much better and so in this post I share a couple that I use.

The links I have provided to the docs should give you access to your own copy – what you see will be yours and not a shared or published version. If you have problems with the link I have added another link where the document is currently published online.

Those of you in the English primary schools will appreciate the fact that we have new literacy and numeracy frameworks to work with and this is an example of a weekly literacy planning document that you could use.

You will of course have to remove the information that doesn’t apply and it is currently filled with a few days of planning from last week just to illustrate how it is used- this is the general style of planning we do for a week.

I like the fact that a digital document that remains as such can take advatage of the links that you can add. Once it is printed those links are dead.

Get your copy – Weekly literacy plan. If you have trouble with link you can view the document here.

Our timetable changes every week, as well as we accomodate different things going on in school we deal with staff absence, courses etc.  Rather than use an online calendar we use a simple weekly timetable that outlines what we are doing – this year we have also added links from the subjects to their respective planning documents too.

Get your copy – Weekly timetable. If you have trouble with link you can view the document here.

Rick my teaching colleague and I are using Google Docs to organise, author and share our planning for this year and it is already proving useful as we make changes during the week to planning. But the person you share it with will of course always have access to the most recent copy.I look forward to the further development of the template resource currently in it’s infancy within Google Docs so that I can make a template from my Docs home screen and generate further copies from that.

I hope you may find some of the Docs useful – let me know if they are and if you have any of your own to share.

It has been a quieter few weeks in terms of our use of Google Docs, by our standards anyway – so I have combined some of my reflections over the last fortnight. Although less prominent in the daily work of our literacy unit the use of Google Docs has continued and has become more and more intrinsic to the thoughts of the year group.

Modelling examples of collaboration with Google docs.

Last time round I spoke of identifying the fact that the children were not very productive when taking their first steps into the collaborative use of docs. Rick and I spent some time this week modelling some of the behaviours we want the children to be aware of when working in a team. With all of the children in my room I worked on the computer connected to the SMARTBoard and Rick on one of our laptops. We had created a document that mirrored the children’s project, shared between us we gave a running commentary of our thoughts and what we were doing in terms of teamwork.

Initially we spent some minutes just talking to each other about what had been completed so far and what we were both planning to do. Key teaching point: begin the collaborative session with a mini-meet that provides a plan for what is to follow. As we began working I ensured the children were aware that I told Rick, and he did likewise, where I was working in the document. Key teaching point: to have document awareness, a sense of where your peers are working. During the modelled session I was constantly talking through my decision processes for the research side of things and also being explicit about my communication with Rick. Prior to adding an image or some text I would mention to him what was going to happen. Key teaching point: communicate what changes you are making so that your team are aware of what is occurring, no surprises.

I would recommend this modelling phase to anyone using Google Docs in a collaborative sense with younger children, to help illustrate what is expected.

Development of this skill within the children’s groups.

The teamwork side of things is our biggest challenge and we talk about it everytime we continue our project work. It feels a little new and messy at the moment, but I have confidence that these sorts of skills can and should be refined. I know that they will work better together in future projects and that they are much more aware of the issues.

Over the course of the project and in subsequent sessions (to our modelling lesson) they have shown they can apply the examples we set. A group in my class today began by logging into documents and then they tilted their laptop lids down and talked about what was to follow.

Children turning independently to GDocs

Their has been strong evidence this week of a shift in the children’s thinking in terms of GDocs as tool. During a Design and Technology session about musical instruments one of the children independently used Google Docs to make some notes about the research that they were doing. Totally unprovoked. A small example that shows that we have positioned the application as a personal tool for them and they are beginning to use it as one of their own personal tech choices.

Sharing beyond the domain

With tighter security comes less opportunity to share beyond the domain. In the administrator settings I have the option to NOT allow the sharing of documents beyond the domain. It is important to consider that this tighter grip does not allow collaboration of documents, synchronous or otherwise, with children from other schools, towns, cities, countries.

I am currently collaborating on some weather data for June with the British School in Muscat, Oman. However this has to be done through my own personal Google account. It is key to be able to balance security with collaboration beyond the walls of the classroom. It will be interesting to see what happens when we have an international opportunity to do something like this perhaps in the future.

Spell checking in Firefox 3

Just a little aside really about the use of Firefox version 3 which checks my spelling as I am writing in a form. It also seems to, although somewhat erratically, check my work as I am typing in Google Docs. There is a spell check function that works reasonably well, but I like the idea that using FF3 it will underline incorrect words in red as you type (you currently have to switch the spell check on in GDocs) It could be a useful feature.

Providing a choice – 56 out of 60 children

Back in December I surveyed the children in Year 5 and 6 who had been using the laptop resource in their classrooms for approximately 3 months. One of the questions asked for their preference in writing, either with pen or pencil on paper, or with a laptop. About 90% said they would prefer to write using a laptop. On reflection I think those figures illustrate the continued positive attitude towards the resource in the classroom. Perhaps inflated by a general good feeling about the technology.

For a literacy task this week I told the year 5 children that they complete the independent writing task either in their literacy books or by using Google Docs. 56 out of 60 children chose to write using Google Docs. I questioned about their choices in the last part of the lesson and they ranged from: “I can work quicker”, to, “I don’t have to worry about my presentation” and “I will be able to continue the work at home.” The percentage is high again but this time around I know that they are making a much more informed choice due to the amount of time we have spent using the tool.

This idea was one that popped into my head at about 3am. After George, my 2 year old son, woke us and I had settled him again, I began thinking about Google forms (as you do at 3am – what better time to be thinking about that subject!!) and the current work we are doing on film narrative and The Piano by Aidan Gibbons. Take a look at the film for yourselves.

An emotion graph is a simple line graph comparing a range of happiness to sadness against different points (time) in a story or film. This technique of graphing the emotional ups and down within a story really helps children to visualise the whole story in a different way. Once the graphs are complete they can be discussed in reference to the different peaks and troughs of emotion. “Why is the main protagonist so upset at this point on the graph, what has happened?”, “In which part of the story is he the happiest?”

The graph can reflect the events in any type of linear narrative, whether that be a book or film – it could even reflect the varying emotions within an event such as a football match. As you can see the whole plot in one graph it is useful to engage the children in conversations about the structure of the plot and the way that the emotions are tied into generic story elements such as problems, conflicts and resolutions.

The children in my class really enjoyed watching The Piano today as we began our film narrative unit. One of the children said that the main character was playing his emotions on the piano, they were the notes of his life. Such a lovely turn of phrase. The Piano is an excellent text to explore in terms of an emotional graph as each of his memories linger, bringing joy and sadness into his life again.

Once you have opened up your Google form (and I have explained in more detail how to do this on this post) I have simply added a new question for each of the different events that I would like the children to gauge the emotions for. Because the film is only two and half minutes long I have chosen about ten or eleven events. I have then chosen “Choose from a list” question type and added the numbers 0 – 10. For each question I added a reminder about the emotional scale from sad (0) to joyous (10) as some additional text. I found it really easy to generate one question and then just duplicate it using the link, and just edit what the event is.

Your form is complete and now you just need to add the line graph itself to the linked spreadsheet. You will see in your spreadsheet that the header (top) row is filled in with the different events from left to right. Under each column heading add the average =AVERAGE(Range) formula for the cells below, say down to 100 cells below. This will average out the different responses from your form and return a single figure. Don’t worry the survey results should always be added below your average row. I like to add the “Rounded” formatting to these cells as well. Select these average figures and click the “Chart” tool and create a line graph from this data. (These average cells could also be hidden, select the row from the left and click hide row) Find some more detailed steps to making a chart here.

Place the chart to the right of your data or embed within a blog post somewhere, and enlarge it so that it is clearly visible. I will be emailing the emotion graphing form to all of our Year 5s and getting them to complete the form (from within the email) alongside watching the film again. We will then be reviewing, as I have mentioned above, the responses and how the emotions vary throughtout the text. I will be encouraging them to justify their responses and decisions with supporting evidence from the film.

Now it is your turn to complete the emotion graphing survey that I have referred to – watch the film again, if you haven’t already, and answer the survey that I have embedded below. The code for embedding a form is available when you click “Edit/Resend Form” and then it is under the “Preview and Send” link.You will also see that I have published the graph which can be done from within the graph drop down menu.

Let me know what you make of this idea and whether it was worth a sleepless early morning!

• How can you use this idea in your own narrative or literacy unit?
• Have you used emotion graphs? (I know there is an option with Turning Point voting systems to do something similar which I have used in the past)
• How have you used them?
• How else have you used Google forms in the classroom?