digitalstorytelling Archives

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 4: Improve the Story

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, Mapping, VoicethreadNovember 26, 2008April 22, 2019Leave a Comment

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.

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:

Google Earth’s imagery provided the class with ample inspiration for what to be creating in their story – they could see and explore it in front of them. They were not looking at a piece of paper and trying to drum up something.
The confidence and comfort that they have with the main character and the background to the story.
A clear and purposeful backbone to the tale – James is escaping.
An agreed escape route. The whole class can then discuss the various moments in the escape. The sharing and peer support is vital.
Easy audio recording has provided the children with a quick avenue into generating story content. There is no password/login/signup/complex method/knowledge/skill barrier to using Vocaroo. The children were recording their ideas immediately.
Audio and text situated on the image at where it happens in the story brings, often disparate, storytelling elements together.

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 3: Consolidate and Empower

TomGoogle Earth, Laptops, Literacy, MappingNovember 25, 2008April 22, 20196 Comments

Photo by debaird
Attribution-ShareAlike License

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.

Any opened work from a network drive will begin life in the Temporary Places folder.
Find the main folder for your work, all of your placemarks should be below it in a list. Select it.
Right click this main folder to bring up the sub-menu.
Click “Save to My Places”.
The folder moves up and out of Temporary Places.
Find the main folder for your work again. Select it.
Right click this main folder to bring up the sub-menu.
Click “Save as…” or “Save place as…”
Navigate to your network folder.
Name the file appropriately so you know what it is.
Save.
If saving over the top of previous work allow it to replace the older file.

We wouldn’t have been as successful if it wasn’t for about 6-8 children in each class who became the experts. These children had completed the tasks set them and had a very good understanding for what we had done. They knew their way around Google Earth. I would encourage you to seek these children out and empower them to support their peers.

The class experts for the saving routine above, were simply those who had been successful – I just called upon them to go and support someone else doing it. They were willing and supportive with their peers and guided them rather than taking over an important difference which I am always pointing out. This supportive ethos has always been with us as we help the children to understand how to problem solve with their class laptop resource. We try to encourage them to ask two other class member to help before talking to an adult.

Quick round-up

The slightly tricky nature of local content in Google Earth and saving work can cause younger children to get a bit disorientated.
Take plenty of time with younger students to demo and walkthrough the save process to a network folder.
With panes and folders open or closed the views can be very different on different machines so it is worth having confident children to help support their peers and to try and pre-empt some issues.
As everyone in this set of activities is altering the same placemarks, multiple copies can arise and can confuse. Ensure the children only have one set of placemarks checked.
Take time to consolidate Google Earth skills and confidence – use outside of the writing time and just allow them to explore. Reinforce the basic layout and structures.
Encourage a general sense of independence in problem solving – ask 2 friends for help before an adult. Do not underestimate the impact low level informal peer support can have on a technology rich lesson or environment.
Empower those confident students to actively support their peers, call them experts and make them feel special.

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 2: Add your Voice

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, Mapping, VoicethreadNovember 24, 2008April 22, 20197 Comments

Your talent scouting has hopefully provided you with a great location for your class narrative and perhaps you have even plotted the journey the main protagonists will take during the tale. What’s next? Today we continued our Google Earth storytelling as we added audio to the placemarks.

In my opinion children’s writing, whether digital or otherwise, can be greatly improved through the use of purposeful speaking and listening activities about the narrative prior to doing any individual work. Photostory and online resources like Voicethread provide us with a great set of tools to allow technology to further impact in this process. My aim in planning this unit was to include audio within the children’s Google Earth placemarks, I wanted their rehearsed, spoken parts of the story right in the place it happens.

Noel Jenkins must have been on my wavelength as at much the same time he posted on the excellent Digital Geography about the use of Vocaroo and audio notes in Google Earth. Vocaroo is simply ideal for classroom use and it could not be any easier to use. No login or sign-up, no profile or saved content – just hit record and then grab the code to embed elsewhere. Here is how to add audio to a GE placemark.

My class of 30 9/10 year olds went through this process today as we explored the 6 placemarks in the story we wanted to use for the story. I wanted to keep these the same for everyone so that we had some control over what people were doing and so that we could also share ideas amongst the class. They found the process simple, the audio is not great, but it is so easy to do it’s worth it. The Vocaroo site held up very well with 30 children working on it at much the same time.

It was a great lesson and the children will have some more time tomorrow refining their audio and perhaps adding a second piece of audio improving and building upon the sentences they did today. I worked with a small group of boys on a shared story – we had so much fun telling parts of the escape and adding chicken sound effects for the location in the last image above. I encourage you to give this a try and the clear potential for a huge variety of stories situated in Google Earth is boundless!

The next steps will be to refine some of the audio as I said and to begin to add some written text in the placemark that is scaffolded by the use of the Vocaroo recordings.

This is part 2 of a series of posts documenting our Google Earth Storytelling unit.

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Google Earth is our Paper – Part 4: Improve the Story

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 3: Consolidate and Empower

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 2: Add your Voice