ICT in my Classroom

Our week of storytelling in Google Earth has finished however I wanted to wrap up my reflections on working in this way. In this post I look back over the process and review the benefits you will reap and any challenges that you may face in implementing a similar unit.

A piece of Google Earth storytelling is definitely manageable within a week (5-6 hours) and in that sense is very flexible. The completed outcome from each child was a set of 6 placemarks that included:

• An embedded Vocaroo audio snippet of a rehearsed and planned piece of the story from James’ point of view.
• A written sentence that was a second draft of that first audio clip. An improved version that built in the language work we had done as a class to support the story.

You can see these two story elements in this screenshot of a child’s work.

If you would like to hear the audio, see the other 5 placemarks and the work as a whole then you can download the KMZ file here. During the week I worked with a supported literacy group and here is the audio work we completed together.

Challenges of digital storytelling in Google Earth

• Saving - this has been the biggest issue for us as the children will encounter temporary files saved locally in Google Earth. This is especially true when working on different laptops over a period of days. As the placemarks were the same, it led to confusion. If I was to do another unit of work with GE I would ensure that the children save work with their name included and I would also purge the local files at the end of every session. Another option is to explore the use of Google Maps.
• Uncertainty - as with most applications the more confident you are as a user the more you will get from it. Google Earth has a lot going on with various menus, folders and windows. The children often ran into a sticky spot if they could not find the item they were looking for or generally felt unfamiliar with the layout. If I was to repeat this unit again I would probably ensure there has been equivalent hours put in before hand that doesn’t just orientate them to the basics but allows them time to work with files, saving and the various layers of information. This would raise their level of confidence, consequently the layout of Google Earth would not be a hurdle to better storytelling.

Benefits of digital storytelling in Google Earth

• Visual - beginning with such a rich visual stimulus as Google Earth imagery gives the children such a different experience of storytelling then what they are used to. In this unit we benefited as a class not being straight-jacketed to a written, paper based plan. We were free to roam and explore the imagery we had, there were constraints that we agreed, but the plot was there in that imagery waiting for us to tease it out. 
• Control - the children had control over the way they explored their story. They moved, tilted and zoomed, they controlled how their journey looked to them. I walked around the room during the week and they were all exerting this control over how the narrative space looked to them. I suppose in a small way this personalises the journey for them. 
• Discovery - we began with a single location, a place I believed would be good to tell our escape story. It needed that decision, but from there we decided as a group what would happen. The snakey line you see in the example files or images could have easily taken us in another direction. The children discovered the elements of the story we included. In the first sessions we explored the local area in pairs and the children noted and discussed possible places of refuge. One child shared with us, by zooming in on the SMARTBoard, the building yard that we eventually chose to hide in as James. At that point int he lesson we had not even decided which way to turn from outside his house – but it was clear that the yard would provide us with lots of opportunities so we included it our escape. Let the children find their path, their journey – let them discover what is out there and allow the plot to be formed as you go.
• Embedding Media – Google Earth placemarks allow a whole host of media to be embedded in support of your story. We have added a simple audio player but you could easily have some drama work filmed and uploaded to a video hosting site, then embedded. That would be a great extension to what we have done and not too difficult either.
• Geotagged Narrative – beyond the huge variety of imagery children have as a starting point the sense of making your narrative happen in situ really appeals to me. You have to consider the tense that you work in, however the combination of narrative types in one place is a huge benefit to working in Google Earth. You could have written, spoken, filmed and drawn media all in the very location it is occurring.

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.

These are some of the ideas I have been brewing over during my half term break from school. Today I managed to have a great few hours and got 3 solid looking weeks of planning done which incorporate all of these concepts. As the next few weeks pass I will reflect on their effectiveness in the classroom with our classes.

Photostory

Not a particularly new idea as this is a firm favourite for digital storytelling. I have always spoken highly of this simple application from Microsoft because it has such a clearly set out structure to follow. It is particularly beneficial for young children as there is noa chance they will get lost in an open application searching for features or trying to remember how to do things. Photostory is linear in structure and so each step has to be passed by to finish.

We have had success in the past with Photostory so it is familiar territory for the staff in Year 5 but our classes have yet to look at it with us. They had some brief experience with their classes last year but not on the scale we want to use it.

The children will be generating illustrations, clay models, images and paintings to help tell the story of James and the Giant Peach for the first few days. We are not taking on the whole story though, as the children have already written a letter explaining about his early predicament to an imaginary character. We are going to use Photostory to bring that letter to life and make it multi modal in nature. The prior writing will be a good source of support and the children will add audio and narration of their correspondence in this new digital way.

Comiqs

I first came across Comiqs from Steve Kirkpatrick’s excellent blog. There are growing numbers of online comic and cartoon sites but the feature that makes this so useful in the classroom is its simplicity. I am looking forward to mashing up their writing into this different digital form following our Photostory work. The children will have to reappraise their writing and look at the direct speech of characters in more detail due to the comic book genre.

I have contacted Michael at Comiqs regarding multiple logins and just asking advice in general about using it with a class of 30 or even 60 children in total. It is clear that a class sign in system, like Voicethread, is not yet in place so I wanted his opinion – single login for the class or multiple logins. He replied:

Currently, it might be best to use a single login and password for the site. However, managing the photos, etc, would be a bit of an issue. However, we might look into implementing a paid service with better much login and classroom support.

If this is the case it should be interesting looking out for this in the future. I am excited about letting the children loose on Comiqs and know they will enjoy using it for their digital narrative, nonetheless it remains to be seen how well it copes with large amounts of media in a single account, accessed by many children.

Google Earth

During a seminar at the Scottish Learning Festival Ewan McIntosh explained about using Google Earth for narrative in Penguin’s 21 Steps examples from Charles Cumming. The idea struck me that beginning with a journey would be a great way to tell a story and combined with the children’s general confidence around Google Earth it should be a great medium for narrative.

The idea for our own work is using James and the Giant Peach as our launch pad, but taking it in a different direction. I thought today that the class could write his escape from the clutches of his Aunt and to write the ongoing story using placemarks in Google Earth.

I spent some time hunting around for a place in England somewhere that matched the location of the house from the Dahl story. I found somewhere in Dorset I think, on a hill with a thin sliver of sea visible in the distance.

I will show the children how to create a path using Google Earth and talk through James’ possible escape. We will use the real features of the land to help inform the narrative. I will ask the children to write 6-10 parts of the escape story from James’ point of view. Each placemark could form a paragraph and must refer to the real environment around it.

I love the idea of a visual pathway beginning the story rather than traditional plans or notes. I think the children will respond well to this digital form of stroytelling and perhaps we can make it an option in the future for writing narrative. The possibilities are huge for the scope of this work and combined with other information and creative media within Google Earth layers it could really support children’s storytelling. This is the one I am most looking forward to exploring.

Woices

To support the location driven narrative of Google Earth and to provide the children with the opportunity to talk through their writing ideas prior to using GE, I have decided to plan in a few sessions using Woices. This is a geotagging audio site and is meant to be used for recording audio references “echoes” about places in the world, they then can be combined together to form a “walk” of “echoes” with something in common.

An echo is an audio record that is attached to a physical real-world location or object. Echoes are words, left by one person at some precise place, that can be listened to by anyone, as if their author was still there. Echoes can speak about any topic and respond to any user’s purpose. They can speak about local history, art, curiosities, personal memories, and so on. Just something you think its worth to leave that may make the world a more interesting place.

As soon as I saw this tool i thought digital storytelling on a map! And that is how I am planning on using it, the children will take their journey from Google Earth (see above) and record audio of James’ escape story. The children have to navigate on a world map to the location of the first piece of audio, so giving them a real location to search will be important, and then they record part of the narrative. Whereas Google Earth placemarks are the written version, Woices is the spoken version.

This is still very much an unknown service and I am unsure how it will cope with the media we will throw at it in a very short time. I will be getting in touch with the folk at Woices to forewarn them and to get some advice about usage. Once again their is an issue around many users on one single login and with lots of media being generated.

I am planning that the children will work in pairs to create their Woices audio on the map – once the “echoes” have been created they then can choose a bunch of them to create a “walk” and this will tie in together theor work creating a seamless narrative.

Of course now thinking about it the pooled audio provides for an interesting option of generating a whole variety of “walks” by combining different children’s ideas. I also had the thought that the Google Earth journey type narrative could lead from one path to another. The starting point for one child’s story could be the end of another, the whole class has the same theme and you begin with a shared/modelled piece of work and then the children take different parts of the journey. Combining to form a whole class digital journey narrative.

There are many unanswered elements here and a completely new application to explore in the classroom, but there is also the reliability of Photostory and the exciting prospect of geo-narrative in Google Earth. I am looking forward to what the children make of it all and broadening their horizons to the nature of storytelling and narrative.

I hope that some of you have enjoyed reading the 33 Interesting Ways (and tips) to use your Interactive Whiteboard. The Google presentation continues to grow as people contribute, the last three tips are titled:

• #31 – Snap it! (using the SMART capture tool)
• #32 – Check by order (self checking method using the layering of SMART Nbk objects)
• #33 – Befuddle It (using Befuddle to create a picture puzzle from your Nbk pages)

Well there is a new kid on the block looking for help!

I have begun a new Google presentation (currently) titled: “Four Eighteen interesting ways (and tips) to use Google Earth in the classroom.” It follows the same model as the IWB presentation, in that it is an open resource that needs your contributions in order to grow. Please feel free to share with your colleagues if you find it useful, spread the word or even embed in your blog.

Contribute one idea or contribute ten! I have made a start – the process is easy.

1. Go to the presentation and take a look at was has been contributed. If you would like to be added as a collaborator send me an email (thomasgeorgebarrett [at] googlemail [dot] com – or use the contact tab at the top of this page – or even send me a direct message via Twitter I am tombarrett) I will invite you in as a collaborator.
2. Add your one slide, one idea and one image.
3. Change the presentation title slide and file name to match the number of ideas.

It will have a humble beginning as before, but I know with your help it will soon grow into something that offers a uniquely authored resource, sharing good Google Earth practice from around the world.

Last Thursday night I presented to Ivanhoe Grammar School about the uses of ICT in my classroom. But this was no ordinary professional development event, Ivanhoe is in Melbourne, Australia.

We conducted the net cast using a free trial on some desktop conferencing software and used Skype for the voice call. It was quite a challenge for me as you don’t have the ability to see the faces of your audience so you don’t know when to go back over things or just shut-up fo a minute! Joseph Papaleo helped organise the event for his school and from his responses it seemed to be a success.

During the presentation I covered a range of topics, giving practical examples of their use in my classroom -

>>Blogs
> Writing for a real audience and purpose
> Visitors and comments

>>Google Earth
> Starting the day with a “Wow!”
> Going beyond geography
> Being an information tourist

>>Using Wikihow for instructional writing

>>Turning Point audience voting system

>>MS Photostory – an alternative presentation tool

I would just like to thank Joseph and the staff at Ivanhoe for inviting me to present and I hope that although the line was a bit poor you all were able to take something that could make an impact in your classroom.

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)
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
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.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
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.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
Local Live – we used a shared collection to add points of interest around our town. This worked extremely well with one login too!
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
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.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
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.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
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)
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT

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.
READ MY PREVIOUS POST ABOUT IT
…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.