Cloudy Tag Thoughts

Earth Day Webcast

Earth Day is finished and it was a challenging but very rewarding experience for both my students and myself. The students all did a great job presenting and each group was allowed to choose the visual component that they felt best expressed their topic choices. Overall I think the most effective student presentations involved the use of slideshare while the students gave their oral component. One group did a VoiceThread, and a couple of groups even did podcasts although they are not uploaded. This first 24 hour Webcastathon will hopefully be the first of many to come. Overall the variety of presentations from other classrooms and teachers was amazing as well as the participation from several different countries.

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Tags: earthday, earthcast08

Destination Google Earth is Up and Running

Destination Google Earth set up by Scot McAdoo, that I wrote about earlier in the summer during the NECC is now in full swing. I think this promises to be a great resource for teachers wanting to use Google Earth in the classroom. Not only is there a forum for sharing lesson ideas and asking questions, but Scot plans to have many tutorials to help teachers of all levels better utilize the tools. Sign-up so the community and conversation will grow!

Technorati Tags: edtech, education, googleearth

How Does the Earth Feel in Your Hands?

When I was a young boy the astronauts were traveling in space and eventually to the moon, and one of the images that helped me understand what the earth meant to me was the shot from Apollo 8. Trying to shift my perspecitve on what it means to only have the earth as our living and finite resource is not something that I could easily internalize. Certainly the scratched and defaced globe that I had access to in the classroom did not achieve this. Later my parents bought a book, I guess because I grew up in the Bay Area, called the Whole Earth Catalog. It sat in a pile of magazines along with the National Geographics and Popular Science. I would just thumb through it and marvel at all the things I had no idea what many of them were for other than that they were for the entire planet. All these media helped prepare me for the perhaps now common perception that social political activities must be considered from a global perspective. Now the students we teach must not only internalize a global perspective on the needs of the world, but they will also compete on the global stage. They can begin accessing infomation from a global source, and they can also begin manipulating models of the earth and move from a macro view of places and things to a micro view in a matter of seconds.

How does the earth feel to you as you spin and zoom and change your viewpoint? Whose view point is it? Will our children become more attached to the planet or will the interface for globes such as can be seen through Google Earth, Earthbrowser, 3d Globe, or ESRI GIS become just another tool losing the metaphysical perspective. One critical element that I'm fascinated with is the real time updating of information compared to the quickly outdated and frozen globes we grew up with. I have a feeling that Google Earth will eventually be more popular with teachers if it hasn't already with the amount of lesson ideas people are sharing online and allowing teachers to download.

Two sessions at the NECC related directly to Google Earth. One session with Hall Davidson had to be changed because of licensing issues that are soon to be resolved with teachers using the program on more than one computer in the classroom. Here is the link to download the session guide when it is available. I also went to a BOF (birds of a feather) session with Scot McAdoo and other teachers from Oklahoma City. They have a web site called destinationgooglearth.com which will have lesson plans, links, and ideas on implementing the software into the classroom. It is not up yet, but it looks like it should be a great resource. They also gave a handout with other resources which I went ahead and tagged. There are so many possible uses of the program that I wonder what my perspective will be by the end of the next school year.

Technorati Tags: necc06, necc2006, googleearth, edtech,

So Many Possibilities for GPS and Geocaching Webquest for the Classoom

I'd started thinking about this idea a while ago because one of the skills that is always taught in the 4th and 5th grade in the fall are the basic terms of geography. At my new school I wanted to possibly try something different and more in line with project based learning.  I had thought of trying to modify a webquest I had come across for a trip across the U.S. by Sheila Rutherglen. I had emailed her asking if she had updated the project, but she hadn't been teaching the appropriate grade level for awhile and so hadn't done anything with it. That was too bad because I was thinking that with Google maps and travel information for every major city for hotels, there might be several opportunities for the students to be very specific at where they would stay, food, and places visited. I periodically check the blog googlemapmania for modifications that I can use in the classroom and heck someone has even come up with a way to find a hotdog stand in Chicago. I also thought that the Mapquest feature that allows students to input the longitude and latitude to find locations would be very useful. I didn't have enough time to put together what I wanted, but now with Quest Garden up and running as Bernie Dodge had promised at the NECC, I may be able to create a webquest for next fall. He also happened to mention an interesting combination of Google maps and Flickr called geobloggers which has great potential but it runs a little slow. The site says,

"The idea is that you go out into the (urban) wild armed with a camera and possibly a GPS unit. You take a bunch of photos and upload them to flickr. Then you add "tags" which lets geobloggers (and other sites) know where the photo was taken, using "geotagged", "geo:lat=xxx.xxxx" and "geo:lon=xxx.xxxx". Flickr handles the management of the photos, geobloggers does the rest."

Towards the end of November I am going to Japan for three weeks and one of the recommendations was to buy a GPS device to help navigate through the train stations. As I researched I came across geocaching. Earlier in the year I had been recommending to a few of my students and parents that are technically inclined and were looking for social activities to try it out and recommended the web site that looked like the best place to start. There seemed to be many possible applications in education but without the tools I a wasn't sure how to incorporate the activity into the classroom. Today David Warlick has an (as always) excellent overview about the activity as well as many potential activities for the classroom.

I was reading about the digital story telling event that KQED is sponsoring and while I didn't have a chance to drive up to San Francisco, in the paper Mike Langberg of the San Jose Mercury wrote about Hewlett Packard sponsoring the use of iPaq pocket PCs and GPS to create a walk though called Scrape the Hood which sounded very promising. As the participants walked through the neighborhood their location which was located with GPS would allow them access to stories or explanations of events that had happened there in the past.  Members of the Antenna theatre participated and I had attended many events in the 80's and 90's that they had created using walkmans. I loved the sense of dislocation caused by the incongruity of what the eyes were seeing versus what the ears heard. One of the examples sounded similar to what I had experienced with the sound at one location of  running water because a stream originally was located there. I was also reminded of a radio event that was broadcast from the essential and groundbreaking radio station KPFA. I was with a group of people following instructions via the radio and they involved the hypothesis that there were catacombs underneath the streets of San Francisco and the aged artist (I can't remember his name) and former member of the 60's Fluxus movement was following us beneath the ground and explaining the appearance of what was under our feet. I'll always remember the look on the face of a hotel clerk as we walked through the lobby listening to a voice telling us what was underneath our feet.

Technorati Tags: education, geocaching, gps, technology, warlick, webquest