Archive for October 4, 2006

My Quikmaps lesson

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Mapping

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.

Quikmaps Wiki

WIKI on Google Earth in the classroom

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Google Earth, Mapping

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.

Extension activity in Maths today

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Google Earth, Literacy, Maths, My class

Further to our work on Mina’s journey using Google Earth – I asked some children who had completed the standard addition sums in their maths books to calculate the different distances of Mina’s travels. They used the measure tool in GE 4 to plot her journey from major city to major city – they then applied the addition strategies to work out her total approximate distance.

Dracula – shared writing in Google Earth

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Google Earth, My class

To model the writing process in the literacy lesson we do something called shared writing and this week we used Google Earth as a platform for this. We are currently studying Dracula and we looked at Mina Murray’s journey to track Jonathan Harker her fiance. She travelled from Hull to Hamburg and through Europe to Budapest, there are obvious geographic uses of GE but we also used the placemarks to write her diary entries as she left England behind and ventured into the wilds of Transylania.

The children were enthralled and it just gave the writing that little bit more purpose – they then went off and wrote some similar emotions as she travelled.