ICT in my Classroom

As we continue our Sealife topic we have been exploring the conservation of sea turtles and subsequently climate change. We learned how rising sea levels have a direct impact on sea turtle nesting sites. I just wanted to outline some of the great resources we used in our classes this afternoon.

The main part of the afternoon was working on an science experiment that replicated the effect of acidic oceans on the coral reefs. This has been ideal for the work we have been doing recently. Whilst I was exploring the resources on the Under the Sea IMAX film I found some nicely produced resources for classrooms. Amongst it is the experiment we did.

We placed shells and chalk  in cups filled with varying levels of water and vinegar – each representing “Clean”, “Polluted” and “Very Polluted” seawater. We used some digital scales to weigh the shells and chalk before putting them in. The children enjoyed seeing the immediate reaction in the more “polluted” test and jotted down some observations. We were going to retrieve the solids today and check them, but I asked the class if they would like to leave it a full 24 hours – they agreed, so we will have to wait until tomorrow to see the full effect.

After setting up the experiment and completing some initial observations we invited the children to explore the Zerofootprint website. It provides a very child friendly survey (well written and very accessible to different reading abilities) about different aspects of life:

• Transportation
• What you eat
• Home and School
• What you throw away
• What you use

The results are then collated and the children are able to compare their own data with averages from countries around the world. We spent some time discussing some of the averages and talking through as a class the differences we found. It is a good way to compare personal and average national data.

To draw the afternoon to a close and provide another discussion point, I showed the children Breathing Earth which is a CO2 emissions, birth rate and death rate simulation. It is a strangely engaging animation and simulation of real data on a world map. We looked closely at the indication of CO2 emissions and identified the major culprits around the world. (As I explained what was shown I had some dramatic music on in the background which added to the impact of the simulation.)

I spent time drawing it back to the experiment we were doing – higher CO2 emissions means more polluted oceans, means more acidic effects on coral and sealife.

As a class we discussed how these levels might be linked with population and other factors. Breathing Earth provides a rich and engaging starting point for discussion that I would highly recommend. As you roll over a country on the world map more detailed data is shown for that nation. I think that Breathing Earth could prove a useful data resource in it’s own right – children retrieving information by finding the country and then rolling over. Better then looking at a list or on a basic webpage.

After the children had some time to work in pairs at their laptops exploring the Breathing Earth simulation we closed out the day with a film from WWF called “Knock-On Effects“.

A lovely animation that helps to remind us about the difference we can make if we all act. I love the domino metaphor and how if we all act and put up our dominoes we can gain great momentum and change some of the damage already done. We finished the day talking about what the class could do at home tonight to make a difference and what they thought of the animation.

I think that some of these resources have really helped us to show the children the connections. And to see, for example, that switching off that light at home could effect a sea turtle finding a nest. In a positive way. One domino at a time.

At this time of year I like to look at this great resource in Google Earth I think it will be a useful teaching aid for Science.

It shows the leaf colour of major forests in and around the UK, the information is gathered from the Forestry Commission sites and layered into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.
Open this Placemark

Take a look at my wikispace for classroom uses of Google Earth for further resources. 

A short while back I was buoyed by the use of Google Spreadsheets in our science lessons. The children enjoyed the fact that we were sharing data and it added an edge to their motivation. They questioned the data that popped up as the sheet updated, they enquired about it’s ownership and accuracy. However this week sharing a Google presentation did not run so well!

I assumed we would have a similar experience and the sharing feature would work just as well. Groups were created in each class they were assigned a planet (we are looking at the solar system) and after a short intro, asked to explore our del.icio.us links and create one slide (or more if needed) in a ready made presentation. 3 children were working on a wireless laptop. It just never really got off the ground and I found my self firefighting access, update, deletion and wireless problems. Admittedly the technology got in the way of the learning  and it proved a disappointing afternoon. You really do win some, lose some. There were of course some groups that worked without any issues. So what went wrong – I think that it is important to try and reflect on the successes and failures on this blog so that I learn from it and others do as well.

1. We put a lot of pressure on the wireless network in the session as 16 machines were active and Google docs regularly refreshes so the web connection was very busy.
2. Some kids worked on the class PC and they seemed to work a lot smoother.
3. The children accessed del.icio.us links and these included a NASA image gallery so that could well have chewed up the bandwidth a bit.
4. Google presentations deals with different data than the spreadsheets, whole slides need to be updated sometimes with images etc – not just a number in a spreadsheet.
5. The children had to start from scratch and make new slides for their planet – some mix ups went on here.
6. All of the children were using one Google domain login – not sure if this hindered.

On reflection the idea is still a good one. Children all contributing to one presentation that has a common theme. They all have a piece of the jigsaw. But I think that we just asked too much of the wireless network, it certainly was far more than we have ever done. I am uncertain if the same login made an issue, I may try out some individual account logins with a similar activity.

I think that the most important thing to learn from this is that sharing Google Presentations works smoother when on hard wired PCs because it deals with a larger data set than spreadsheets.

Taking risks is a good thing. If I had never planned such an activity I would not have learned about how differently the application performs in the classroom. Were I to do it again in the future I would feel better prepared. Lesson learned.

Today was Day 1 in terms of our laptop use in the classroom and we hit the ground running, so to speak – just how I like it. I am sure you have had days like today, when it is a bit of a whirlwind from 8am right through to 4pm – where does the time go? Today the sands just seemed to slip through my fingers! Not to say it was one of the best days for a long time.

We now have 8 Toshiba laptops running happily in both of our Year 5 classes and today we kicked off with a simple word level activity in literacy. One group worked on Race to Ramses! a game about combining prefixes and suffixes to create new words. I have taught with laptops in the past but the new technology (laptops and WAPs) is just so much more reliable. And it is great seeing children completely engaged with one to one technology supporting their learning, I am so pleased to see it in the hands of the pupils – which is the whole point. You might think “web game, one group…not really setting the world alight” – but I suppose it is a culmination of a lot of work and to finally get things in front of children, reliable and solid feels like a big achievement.

Needless to say in the afternoon we swam into deeper waters and I’d like to think we pushed the envelope a bit…

The morning was successful and the children enjoyed working on their own machine and many children asked for the web address for the game – so we will have to get our del.icio.us account sorted or get them into their Google accounts soon!

In the afternoon we were looking at some science work we have begun regarding healthy living and exercise. Today we explored pulse rates and we used an online spreadsheet to share our results, hence the title of the post. (This work is similar to some online spreadsheet action we had last year with my Year 6 class) I decided to use a Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Docs application for a while (in fact I have a few grumbles about that – more soon) but you could have easily used EditGrid as an alternative – I set the sheet up so that all of the children’s names from both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other columns were labelled, “Resting Pulse1, Resting Pulse 2…” It was in these cells that the kids added their resting pulse after counting for 30 seconds and doubling.

I then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login on all 8 laptops per class that I put around the room – so in effect I logged in 16 times (plus my PC and SMARTBoard, so 17) to the same document from different locations. We talked a little about how to find our pulse and then asked the children to record 10 instances of their resting rate into the spreadsheet. It was great! With the live update feature we were able to see individual results popping up all over the place and even from next door in Rick’s class who were doing the same. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent – even with 17 simultaneous users on a single login. The children really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a great overview of not only the class year group working together, but also to the sorts of data people were adding. Children from the other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning the validity of results from kids in my class.

The children had a tendency to sit with the laptop in front of them, in small groups rather than freely moving around the classroom and accessing any machine. But I suppose that is due to the nature of task.

Within the space of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected approximately 600 individual results all in one place. No doubt they will be quicker next time. This method of data collection also allows us the ability to then manipulate the results afterwards, working out averages of the whole year group etc. I would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable kit in your classroom, we have already said that it will be an excellent data entry method for our maths lessons on data handling.

It is now 12 hours since I started the day at school and I am just about coming up for air, no don’t worry I am not at school still! – but it is great to reflect here on these sorts of days. One to remember and I hope you might take some of these ideas and use it yourself.

We got round to looking once more at our Science Online resource over at Editgrid. I had some trouble yesterday with it so I thought I could try dumping the cache in Firefox and that worked really well.

So in the morning I pasted in the data which I added to Excel yesterday and sorted out an average and simple bar graph which you can see I have linked to below, also here.

Then the other year 6 class added their own data – we watched as it updated live, the children loved it and we talked about how the graph and average were also changing.

It would be great to be able to do this with schools in other countries – after all exercise is universal! SO GET INVOLVED – all the instructions are there for you to do the short exercises and then you can add you data into the pool.

Real data we can all share; to help better demonstrate how reliability is imperative in scientific results.

Today we were back to school. We had a good day and pretty much hit the ground running.

I decided that during our revision of the human body, and specifically whilst we were looking at pulse rate we would use our Science Online spreadsheet resource to share results between the 2 Year 6 classes.

Although over the last few months we have had nearly 300 individual views and some positive comments on the resource, nobody has yet been in a position to contribute. So I thought I would look closer to home and share pulse rate data between the classes.

The important principle still remains underpinning why I want this web2.0 tool to work; that more results means more reliability. These tools have to make a difference after all.

So the children recorded the pulse rate (counted for 30 seconds and doubled) when:

• Resting
• After 30 arm circles
• After 30 star jumps
• After 30 side to side jumps

Editgrid has a real time update feature but unfortunately we had a bunch of trouble and the spreadsheet just sort of stopped updating. I decided to save our results in Excel and then import them later – you can still see our “Exercise” sheet and everything ready to go.

You are welcome to have a go and add some data – it took us less than 30 mins to gather the info and add all 30 odd sets of entries to Excel.

Let me know of any other simple experiments or investigations you and your class are doing this term that we could pool the results for.

Image Citation:
Imperial Doughnut, “Pulse” Imperial Doughnut’s Photostream. April 25 2006 <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/134998486_c7519227be.jpg>.

I have just had a look at my Science Investigations grid over at EditGrid and they are now showing the number of views the spreadsheets have had. I was very pleased to see my Science grid has had 210 views, that was quite surprising – but what I have noticed is there has not been any contributions of results from anyone.

Maybe everyone is too scared to dip their toe in, I don’t know – so this is a call for help! Please contribute what you can to the shared results – after all the premise of the tool relies upon other people contributing to the investigation and then benefiting from the shared, pooled data – showing your class more reliable data.

Many thanks for all of your responses and comments for this idea. I have created the spreadsheet that I hope to use for the sharing of results over at EditGrid (I find that this is much easier to use and currently has more features than Google Spreadsheets)

Please go to http://www.editgrid.com/user/tbarrett/Science_Online and take a look – I have even added a sheet for comments J

Currently there is an investigation, that started this thought process going, on “The effects of temperature change on the rate of dissolving” but there is no reason why this resource cannot expand as the year progresses and as more and more science is completed in classrooms.

There are no results currently present as I am on half term – but I have grand plans (that is if anyone will join me and my class) in completing the science investigation again but at the same time so we see real time changes as children enter results.

This is work in progress and I would appreciate any suggestions or ways to improve the resource, anything about design or layout too. I already have some ideas about using Flickr and perhaps Google Documents or blogs to collaborate on the scientific method as well as the results.

Please visit and contribute so we can all benefit from the science we do but never share

I discovered this neat little network link Google Earth file via Frank on the Google Earth Blog. I think it will be a useful teaching aid for Science.

It shows the leaf colour of major forests in and around the UK, the information is gathered from the Forestry Commission sites and transposed into Google Earth. The colours will change as the Autumn season progresses.

In class we are soon to be looking at life processes in Science so I will be keeping an eye on this one. I thought I might take a snapshot of Google Earth with this network link on, like the image above and watch it in a Flickr slideshow with the fade on or in Picasa with similar fading settings to illustrate to the kids the changing colours of this time of year.

Download the Google Earth file here >> Leaf Colour in the UK