Archive for October 11, 2006

My Name in Google Lights

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Google, Google Earth, Mapping

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

Quikmaps

Ideas Ideas Ideas…

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Blogging, My class

When I get an idea and I know I want to post about it here – I just write a Title for it and save it as a draft. Now for some reason this whole web 2.0 thing seems to be making me generate more ideas than I currently have time to write about. But in the past they would be lost amongst my grey matter or on some scrappy bit of paper, now they are here…there are enough now even to post about them, my drafts currently look like this…

Your Drafts: Sketchup + WW2 Shelters, Google Gadgets in class, Got to get me some of those…, Science and Editgrids, My Handwriting, Differentiate with EditGrids, Audio Settings, iTunes and Maths, Bubblr + Quikmaps .

Mmm maybe if I stopped writing about this and started writing about some of the above…

Take it slow – enjoy the view!

5 years ago

by tombarrett in Google Earth, Mapping, My class

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.