Create the space for dialogue
I took these pictures in 5 minutes around my classroom during an afternoon of work last week. It was great to see so many different things going on in our learning environment. There are some great examples of artwork done by the class as well as a wonderful display created by our brilliant teaching assistant on James and Giant Peach.
Make sure you get a look at the laptop screens to see what the children are up to, what can you spot?
On Thursday I had the opportunity to head down to London to take part in the Amplified’08 event held at NESTA HQ. In addition I was grateful to also be able to attend the MIrandaMod2 unconference at the London Institute for Education.
Network of Networks
The amplification of voices is the intent for Amplified08. Voices that have already come together in their own social networks, to meet face to face and take the use of social media in their fields of work onto the next level. I was in the company of about 200 other professionals who passionately believe in the power of social media, in one form or another, to change what they do. I was pleased to meet Drew Buddie and Leon Cych and between us we flew the flag for education in amongst this wider group.
The session topics were sketched out on the wiki and after a brief introduction by Toby Moores and NESTA we huddled around a whiteboard to find the location for the conversations. I attended a session called “From conscripts to followers – new forms of leadership and organization” that sprung up from a blog reaction by David Terrar to Seth Godin’s book Tribes. I listened to the group talk about current workforce models and how social media has a role to play, how communication streams are different then they were a year ago and how it is possible to utilise them.
I explained to the group that I work with 30 social media experts everyday and then said I was a primary school teacher and that the children were ten. I asked what will the large corporate world do when my class are ready to get into the workforce? I discussed some of the online tools we use and the fact we have a Nintendo Wii in the class and some of the ways we have already used it – I explained that when I talk to the children on their terms and engage with them in a place that they know and enjoy, there is an instant community of use. The children know that I am aware of the ways they use social media and other technologies – they appreciate that it is OK to talk about it and enjoy it.
As with many of these events, or certainly what TeachMeet was built upon, the corridor conversations were also amazingly valuable. After the session I talked with Graham Stewart, Euan Semple and Anne Marie McEwan about the future of Amplified and what might happen. I referred to the fact that I left Glasgow and the TeachMeet at the Scottish Learning Festival feeling inspired and empowered to organise an event of my own. We talked about the level playing field those who use social media are standing on – we can all publish, have a TV or radio station or be a journalist.
I hope that in supporting each other social media and the wider use of online tools can be further leveraged in our professions. I believe that TeachMeet and the wider edtech community in all their glorious guises can exemplify how to use these tools in an open way. The way that we share how we work and our successes is not the same in the corporate arena. It was a privilege to encourage people to think about education in their discussions and all the good that goes on. May the voices of teachers continue to be heard loud and clear.
MirandaMod2
Drew Buddie encouraged me to attend the second unconference organised by MirandNet. It was a quick dash up the road with Drew from NESTA but was a real pleasure to attend and once again exciting to hear about the innovative work going on in classrooms. I was thrilled to also get a chance to meet Dai Barnes and Daniel Needlestone who I have enjoyed talking to in the EdTechRoundUp meetings.
Loosely organised but with a tighter rein then, say a TeachMeet, we had a range of speakers from across the education sector. Leon Cych was in charge of the video stream that went out on UStream and he monitored the chat and twitter feeds as well.
I had a little unplanned stint talking about multi-touch interactive devices and what the future may (already) hold for classroom technology. Rachel Jones the head of education at Steljes (who kindly supported the event with some money for the food and drink) spoke to the group about future classroom designs and how the SMART Table could play a part in collaborative learning. I look forward to working with Rachel in the near future to help ensure the most is made of the SMART Table and to explore the possibilities it and the Durham project brings to the classroom.
My planned talk to the group on the use of Google Earth for writing began with me tipping a laptop on it’s screen and sliding it underneath a visualiser. We had to improvise as my laptop would not connect to the projection system. I talked about the work we have been doing this week in class and how we used the visual support of a location in Google Earth to define our story. It was fun being able to talk and showcase what goes on in my class and another opportunity to reflect on my practice.
Dai Barnes took the floor and talked with great passion about his students work with Alice and Mindmeister – he also did an amazing impromptu demo of how to embed a Google Form in a Moodle page. After the event Leon, Dai, Drew and I had a pint and continued the conversation. Thankyou to MirandaNet for having me and it would be great to attend the next if I can.
Overall it was a great day of sessions, conversations and learning – there was so much to reflect upon and it was inspiring to meet my network face to face. It only serves to strengthen those connections and inspire you further.
We have had our Nintendo Wii in our class for about a week now and the children have been busy making their Mii avatars. They have truly engaged with it and seem to appreciate and understand the valuable role it can play in our class to have fun and support learning.
One idea I mentioned a few posts ago was that of using Wii Golf for addition, here are some more lucid thoughts and experiences of using it in the classroom.
Wii Golf Subtraction
We had 20 minutes at the end of the day so as whole class we talked about using Wii Golf to help with some subtraction work. The children have been doing the chunking division method (!) which requires them to use all four operations so more subtraction work was going to be valuable.
I started up a quick round of golf and took a shot. I was expecting to get some information about how far the ball had gone and then subtract this from the total yardage for the hole.
Hole Length – Shot length = Distance remaining
However when you have taken a shot in Wii Golf it displays how much further you have to go. There is no information about how far you have hit the ball. Consequently we had to change our sum and I asked the children about how we could work out the shot length – it was a good teaching point. The children at this point had their own small whiteboards to do work on. Our agreed sum for Wii Golf would be:
Hole Length – Distance remaining = Shot length
Soon the children were busy on their boards and were immediately totally engaged with the task. That comes as no surprise to me – about 95% of the class have a Wii at home, this is what they enjoy being engaged with. The shots will always be 3 digits or less and in that way are perfectly differentiated for my year group.
Wii Baseball Addition
Whilst the children were having a break time my teaching colleague Rick and I had a little play on Wii Baseball and soon more ideas for supporting maths were being batted (sorry) around. If you go to the Practice in Wii Sports and then Baseball you get the chance to hit 10 pitches – on screen you receive information about how far you have hit the ball in metres, perfect for generating addition sums.
As a class I showed them what I wanted to do, hitting the ball and recording the length of the shot and then we worked on the addition to come up with the total metres. I asked children to come up and take 10 shots and we all then recorded as they went on our boards. If they didn’t hit the ball we just recorded the metres they did make. I soon discovered a baseball demon who hit about 6 home runs and 10 excellent shots. I asked the class to split the 10 numbers into two groups and then do 2 sums. Again the highest number was 187 metres, which is pretty good for a ten year old by the way, so the addition sums were ideally pitched to the Year 5 age group.
An added bonus was that after you have hit the ten shots the total length of the home runs are added up and displayed on the following screen. So if the children who were batting hit home runs we had to do a second calculation for home run length. i muted the projector display until we had done the calculation, modelled the work and then revealed the answer.
As a whole class I was able to see on their whiteboard the work they had done and picked up quickly on errors with their method or setting out. However this could easily be done as a small group activity during a lesson.
The children in that 20 minutes were happy, engaged, focused, on task and doing 3 digit subtraction and addition practice. It is important that we begin to realise the potential of these gaming platforms to support learning. I look forward to exploring more Nintendo Wii ideas soon.
In today’s literacy lesson, the third in our Google Earth storytelling unit, we made the leap from audio or spoken parts of the story to some written work.
The use of the mapping in this story has provided us with a structure through the escape route we chose and also it has provided us with a rich visual stimulus for story content. The bushes James has to break through in his bid for freedom have caused scratches and bruises and ripped his clothing. The building site we have seen has caused James to be covered in dust and mud. In our story he hides between two large lorries and we stretched out with our senses (Jedi style!) and saw workmen chatting on a tea break, heard drills banging into the ground and the smell of diesel fumes from machinery. All of this has been generated from studying the satellite imagery in our story location.
Over the last few days we have been working on generating a bank of good vocabulary for the escape, which we have on our WOW WORD display. Through discussion and thesaurus work we have gathered lots of verbs and adjectives that have already proven valuable for the children to use in their stories. We have also tried to generate lots of different alternative sentence openers – many of the recorded audio sentences began with “I”. We used the verbs we had generated and coupled them with adverbs to generate powerful sentence openers. Again these are displayed on the wall for the children to see and use in their work, and in fact many of the improvements made today included many of the examples you can see.
![P271108_16.07[01]](https://i0.wp.com/farm4.static.flickr.com/3039/3062194918_f968467886.jpg?resize=420%2C295 "Google Earth is our Paper - Part 4: Improve the Story 6")
Today the children used this language work to improve the sentences they had begun in their Vocaroo audio. Underneath the code for the Vocaroo player they added <p> for a paragraph and then wrote an improved version of their audio. We encourage them to make small changes to the original sentence, so just add a WOW word or begin the sentence in a more interesting way.
Here is an example of what one of the placemarks looked like and a second image of what the same item had included in the placemark properties. You can listen to the audio for this example here. The children coped well with writing in this way and had no problems with the coding as it is so simple.
The combination of audio and written text has allowed the children to really improve their writing. I have always been very encouraged when the children have used Voicethread and I think that a technology based audio element can be a powerful way to scaffold the writing process.
I believe that in this unit there have been a few ingredients that have contributed to improved storytelling:
In our writing sessions today I took both classes, all 60 Year 5 children, over two sessions and we continued and completed our work begun yesterday. The children were completing the task of adding 6 audio recordings to the correct placemarks in Google Earth, please see Part 2 for details of the process.
This post is concerned with some issues that have arisen from working with Google Earth and some classroom strategies I have found effective during my work with the application.
Consolidate
There is no better way for children to be successful then to have time to complete their tasks – today was a chance for them to consolidate the process they had begun yesterday and to once more practice embedding code in the Google Earth placemarks. All too often we want to rush the children onto the next great thing, it was useful today to take a breather and just ensure we had done a good job of the audio we worked on for our escape story.
Although a powerful and popular application, Google Earth is not used daily and so some children struggled to find their way around the different task panes and views. Having more time allowed them to become more confident.
As both classes were running into difficulties about what they could or could not see. Often they would think that all of their work had gone, or it has just disappeared – when in fact the placemark had just been unchecked in the Places window. Today I consolidated their basic understanding of the task windows and how to switch between them. I demonstrated the different possible views you could have within the Places window – and pre-empted some of the possible problems based on situations that may or may not have already arisen.
An issue that is well worth knowing about prior to working in Google Earth on a class laptop set is that of multiple content. For our escape story we have 7 placemarks and a path that loads up and is visible – when another child begins their own work another set of the placemarks is loaded up. Today some laptops had 3 sets visible. Children were saying they could not right click any of the placemarks but they had not realised (as the placemarks are identical) that there were multiple placemarks on top of each other. Again I reinforced checking only those placemarks which you need to be visible in the Places pane.
Empower
One of the disadvantages of working in Google Earth is that it is intended to work on a local level – as in the placemarks and items saved in My Places remain on that machine. This causes every laptop to have a different looking Google Earth Places pane, which naturally leads to some confusion. It is worth spending some time keeping on top of what files should and should not be there. My children would be using different laptops everyday and it is unfeasible to try and work with the same one everyday which would have been a time sapper of an organisational problem. Saving work is a little tricky due to the nested nature of the placemarks and content, however this is what we had to do.
I gave myself a good slice of time at the end of each session over the last few days to walkthrough the saving process with both classes.
