ICT in my Classroom

Thanks to Doug Belshaw for making me get on and write this after he pinged my Bubblr post. There are people who are reading my blog

My Bubblr and Quikmaps idea is essentially an extension of a History activity I did with my class of Year 6 kids – they added photos to a quikmap placemark, we then embedded them in our wikispace (see my post about the lesson)

Bubblr is a comic strip creator – once these have been made they can also be added to a Quikmap placemark. See an example I made quickly here.

They can also be emedded into a class wikispace like this one.

All you do is click on BLOG THIS after you have published the Bubblr strip – then copy the first set of code and add it into a placemark in Quikmaps.

I have noticed that Bubblr works much better with Internet Explorer than my usual Firefox – so I would recommend to switch to work with it.

The Google Educators site has gone live and the article I wrote has astonishingly been included They even pushed the boat out and put a picture of me on! Here is the article…

Teachers speak out

Online mapping technologies now play an integral part in my teaching toolkit. Google Maps has allowed many developers the access to a high quality mapping resource that has then spurned mashups or other applications. Quikmaps is a great tool taking advantage of Google Maps at its core – notes and placemarks can easily be dragged onto the map and even images and video footage can be inserted using simple html. These maps can then be saved and even embedded into a class wikispace. We have been exploring our local history and a key activity for my Year 6 children (10-11 year olds) will be to place historic photographs of our town on a modern map. This can be easily achieved through the use of Google Maps and Quikmaps.

The other key mapping tool is Google Earth – which I have used in a range of subjects. From writing diary entries for Dracula to calculating the area of a car park in Las Vegas it engages the children with the quality of the imagery and offers such a wealth of information. We even have been plotting the location of comments on our class blog ( http://priestsic6.learnerblogs.org)

Both Google Maps and Google Earth play important roles in helping me deliver high quality and engaging educational activities with my children.

Tom Barrett, Assistant Headteacher, ICT Subject Leader Priestsic Primary and Nursery School, Nottinghamshire, England

Google Earth is fantastically visual and the kids love it when we quickly zoom back to earth from afar. But we are missing so much! So I decided to slow things down. I basically changed the Fly-To speed settings, from the Tools menu>Options>Touring. I reduced the speed as much as I could using the slider.

Now with a much slower zoom you have the ability as a teacher to reflect on what you see – so if we are zooming in from space I am able to talk about the continents we can see and then countries and regions. It just gives you and the kids much more time to take in the view!

An added bonus is that the aerial photography has slightly longer to load up and will be blurry for less time. Remember that if you fly to your planned placemarks prior to work with the children then the aerial photo data is cached and will load much quicker.

Anyway – enjoy the view.

It has been a busy day for ICT in my classroom today – ususally is on a Tuesday as we have our time over in the ICT suite. Anyway I will try and explain everything we did.

Google Earth – Where are we today?
Did this slightly differently today as I explained to the children I had found the location of some people who had commented on our class blog. So I started looking down on the earth from afar and very slowly zoomed into Sydney and Canada respectively. We then looked closely at Sydney and loaded a 3D model of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge – we even zoomed onto the bridge and panned along it, on the model there are even tiny cars and bikes – I said to the kids it was a good way to start the day – driving along Sydney Harbour Bridge!
Mayomi
Used this great visual mindmapping tool/site today to explore what we had learned so far in our 2D Shape work. Really simple to use when combined with a IWB and wireless keyboard which I used today.

Unfortunately there is no way to embed the map into your own site which would be great so I am going to explore whether I can hack some code to embed the mindmap into a wikispace.

RSS / Newsfeeds for Headlines
Just mentioned this today as we have been looking at newspapers and a journalistic style in our work. I had seen something on a blog before about it, but I just explained what RSS is and how we can get newsfeeds really easily. I think that it is very important to explore how different literacy and news is today – not just broadsheets and tabloids anymore, but a more fluid style of news that is much more personalised.

I just used the “Latest Headlines” bookmark on my Firefox toolbar to show them, we then just guessed from the headline what the news story was about.

Also briefly looked at Headline History which is cracking site I hope to use agin this year.

Quikmaps and our class Wikispace
I was a really happy bunny this afternoon as I knew that I had set my children a challenge, and they rose to it so well! Basically my Year 6 children had made a Quikmap (see previous post about the activity), powered by Google Maps, and then embedded the map into our class wikispace. It looks great! Take a look over on the history pages on our Wikispace. Scroll down and wait for the maps to load – don’t forget to click on the placemarks to see the work the children have done and why it is under History.
It also helped me to understand some of the practical problems that occur when you have lots of concurrent authors of the same space. Look out for some details soon.

This resource utilises the excellent web based information and media available from the BBC about different coastal walks. (Unfortunately some content may be unavailable outside of the UK)

Here I have added placemarks for each part of a walk around Portsmouth/Southsea. For each placemark is a link to a panoramic view of that spot, an audio guide giving a brief insight into the history surrounding that point and a link to further information on the BBC website.

After making this I thought that it will never take away from actually being there and smelling the salty sea and feeling the windy spray against your face but it may help some children to experience places that unfortunately perhaps they may never visit for real.

Download resource here:

Coastal Walks in the UK – Portsmouth and Southsea

I spent most of today attending an INSET day at Highwood Player Infants School talking to them about using their IWBs which they have just had installed.

Many thanks to everyone at the school for inviting me and making me feel so welcome I hope that some of my ideas provide a springboard for your school’s IWB development.

Apart from the resources I planned to discuss we spoke about and used a range of other material. Below I have tried to record most of those thoughts from the morning:

• Artrage 2 – a fantastic art package ideal for the use on the interactive whiteboard. Look out for more on this soon, here on my blog as I will be introducing the use at my school and planning some training.
• Microsoft Local Live – we looked at the school and Highwood Player had really clear imagery from the “bird’s eye view” setting. Would be useful to look at before short walks or local area studies.
• Quikmaps – Another mapping site that allows you to scribble and add placemarks. Again would be to look at before short walks or local area studies.
• BBC Little Animal Activity Centre – we had a read of the animated books and phonic activities.
• Google Earth – just mentioned this briefly but a wonderful tool that I am huge fan of. Read the rest of my blog for more information.
• Topmarks Educational Website Search Engine – very handy when looking for something specifically aimed at schools.

Please follow the links above to the relevant sites.

Further down my blog, you will have to scroll a bit, there is the notes from the session with the links from the images. Please feel free to print these and use in school.

Notes from session (handout)
Ferry Halim Guidance
Powerpoint of Year 2 Instructional writing work (ordering digital images)

I would really appreciate it you could take some time to leave me some feedback about the training session – scroll to the bottom of this post (or the one further down) and find the word “Comments” click on it and leave me your thoughts.

I really value your feedback and remarks so that in the future and can take them into account for other similar training sessions. Thanks again.

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.

Yesterday I started a Wikispace on the uses of Google Earth in the classroom – http://classroomgoogleearth.wikispaces.com

I have only just grabbed the name so there is nothing to look at yet but I will try and transfer some the ideas and kml/kmz files from the GE Forum – I only need 42 more views until I hit 13,000 total views of my GE stuff still no contributions though   Make sure you check it soon.

I came up with this activity at about 8.55am this morning as my class was coming in. So I decided to do it with them. I chose a city and zoomed down to street level, but so you could see a few miles worth of the city.

I then asked them to guess where we were. I then realised we could play a 10 questions type game – where they have only 10 questions to guess the name of the city. It was great fun and soon they were firing away with the questions.

1. Is it in the UK?
2. Is it in Australia?
3. Is it Athens?
4. Does the city have any famous buildings?

Wow! This last question blew me away for about 9.00am in the morning – so I answered, “Yes it has some very famous historic buildings you might know.” Well it didn’t take long for a couple of children to guess it was Rome.

I then zoomed out a little and switched on the 3D Buildings network link (only in Google Earth 4) and we looked at the Collosseum. The children were enthralled as we panned and zoomed into the ancient structure. We even navigated so we were standing on one of the terraces of the great amphitheatre. Well the “wows” soon spread through the room – personally this sort of technology should be doing that.

There is nothing quite like starting the day with a “WOW”

We have to remember we are just looking at our planet, but it is Google Earth that allows us such easy and unique access to these wonders.

So I got to thinkin’ as you do…how can I extend this game a little. So how about if the children were able to exchange a question for a certain amount of zoomed altitude! So the children only have 9 questions to figure out the answer and I zoom further our by say 2000ft Will it help or will they lose the detail they need? Risky…

What about exchanging 5 questions for a 3D model of a building in the city somwhere? Will they know the building? Will it help? Can they then ask questions about the building? (Will I even know the answers at 9.00am in the morning!!)

We posted to our blog where we had been and I must say we all had a great start to our Monday.

So where will we go tomorrow…?

Esther from Google Maps has been in touch after reading my post about the local history work (see below). She has asked if I could write an article about how we use the mapping service in the classroom. It will coincide with some current work I am doing with my class about our local history. I am hoping to use Quikmaps (a mashup of Google Maps) to locate some old photographs on a current map. Should be fun.