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Yes that’s me and a colleague doing some throwing and catching work with our Year 5s during a PE session.

Since it started Google Streetview has been criticised by many for possibly breaching privacy laws and some residents in Buckinghamshire have even blocked the images being taken.

That said, I think the new imagery provides an incredibly rich educational resource. I think it can be used in a number of ways to support curriculum work:

• Illustrate places that are crucial parts of topics, such as historical monuments or geographical features.
• As part of a local area study explore the Street View imagery (where available) to start discussions and activities before going on a walk.
• We used Street View to look at a type of building described in detail in Streetchild used in Year 5.
• Help children picture part of storytelling or writing by following a path or looking at a setting using Street View imagery.
• Explore the maths that surrounds us all using the resource and Maths Maps.

Let me know of any further uses you have for Street View in the classroom – or indeed if your lesson has been caught on the Google cameras.

London to NYC: Swim the Atlantic…

I am so excited to finally be writing about this! Just as the English school Summer holidays are beginning, teachers and educators in Europe will have the opportunity to share their great ideas and exceptional implementation of Google Tools in the classroom.

For almost 3 years I have been running my own mini campaign to bring the Google Teacher Academy (GTA) to these shores. I recall sending numerous tweets, emails and messages to organisers, certified teachers and attendees at US teacher academies, urging them to ask about a UK event. They asked on my behalf and I thank them for raising the flag for me so many times, and putting up with my pestering.

I took every opportunity to press the need for something in the UK as I was experiencing and reading about so much good practice that centred on the use of Google tools. And I have done for the last 3-4 years.

Unfortunately my wishes seemed to be falling on ears that were unable to help:

“We have many requests for Google Teacher Academies to be held in other countries, however we are unable…”

However my determination was reinforced with the GTA UK Google Group and the support shown for it. I was fortunate enough to meet with Google at BETT this year and took the idea of a GTA UK on another step, which has eventually led to this announcement.

Back in November 2008 I wrote about some of my frustrations, and why a GTA in the UK was (is) a good idea,

50 certified trainers in the UK and Europe taking innovative ideas with them back to their schools, districts and counties would help other teachers to begin to better understand Google tools and the potential they have. Admittedly Google tools are not the only thing available, but in my opinion used in the right way they hold a strong place in any classroom toolkit.

I cannot wait to see you all on July 29th at the Google offices in London to share your stories, innovations and ideas. Let’s make it a great one. Good luck with your applications.

Pic: London to NYC: Swim the Atlantic…

StoryBook Earth

Inspired by my work on storytelling using Google Earth and WeTellStories, StoryBook Earth would be a place to share, develop and create geotagged stories. When we write or tell stories we are picturing a location, a setting. In combining the imagery of Google Earth, the ability to add text, audio and even further media to specific places, you have a powerful storytelling form.

StoryBook Earth would develop the idea of “story” and “narrative” and to connect students in different parts of the world. It would also be an attempt to explore how the local becomes the global: to provide an appreciation of students in other parts of the world. It would provide an alternative way of “seeing” and “reading” the world, and possibly introduce students to young people who have experienced:

• Very different lives and personal circumstances
• Conflict
• Natural hazards
• Different climates and natural environments
• Alternative cultures and traditions

I remember watching a 9 year old in my class tell a story to a friend whilst looking at his street in Google Earth, there is something very immediate about such narratives – similar in part to historical walks that explain a story in the places they occurred.

In partnership with the Geographical Association, StoryBook Earth was entered into the Google GeoChallenge grant application process but unfortunately was rejected.

(Thanks to Alan Parkinson at the GA for all his help developing this idea.)

My Reading Diary

In our school the children use little paper reading diaries, similar I am sure to many other primary schools. In it they record the books they are reading, their progress and there is a place for pupils, teachers and parents to make written comments too

So for this one think: Shelfari for kids. A learner centred online tool that would allow children to do all they could with a paper diary – without the worry of losing it! But it would also have a database behind it that would allow children to tap into further reading recommendations. Children could read reviews from other users and discover new genres or books they may not normally.

I would imagine that My Reading Diary would have the potential to integrate with library management systems, so children could read a review or see a recommendation and immediately know if it is in school – and if it is available to read or someone else has it out already!

A further unique feature of My Reading Diary would be as a reading portfolio for children as they progress through school. With simple book profiling it would allow teachers and parents to see the types of books any child is reading and make future suggestions.

I think there is huge potential in this to not only provide a manageable online system to track reading progress throughout school but to also engage children with reading and a social, smart, personalised reading diary.

This idea was sadly rejected by Channel 4’s 4iP which is an innovation fund to stimulate public service digital media (beyond television) across the UK.

Firespeed by kwerfeldein
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

Connect Collaborate Content

I don’t know what I would call this application but I think it could be very important in the way teachers work in the next 5-10 years.

I would propose a single online place for teachers to find curriculum resources and ideas, connect with colleagues teaching the same topics and a platform for collaboration.

Ian Yorston quite rightly said that this place is the web. It perhaps is a matter of pulling streams of different information together, but I just don’t think there has been a purpose built online space that does all of these.

I am doing some work on the Victorians next half term – with my proposed web idea I want to be able to do a single search for “Victorians” and see a multitude of things that we regularly look for and seek out in further web queries elsewhere.

1. Resources - planning, images, video, notebook files, PPTs, worksheets, that sort of thing.
2. Ideas - the resources found on the web do not often come with the narrative behind it, I want to be able to read blog posts and summaries of experiences from those who have taught my topic already. My search results would draw in comments from Twitter and other platforms too.
3. Connections - so many schools, teachers and pupils are working on the same topics, I want to know who is actively doing them too.
4. Collaborate - once I have discovered that XYZ are doing the same topic, I want to have the means to collaborate and work with them.

We have a myriad of educational blogs to cover the ideas, places like Gareth Pitchford’s Primary Resources, Classroom 2.0 that does much to connect teachers and then there is simple tools like Teachers Connecting from Ben Hazzard that is a platform to connect and work together.

But we need one place to do all of this from a single search query, that would be the unique feature. You enter a single topic key word and your search results provide everything.

Another aspect that is important is what happens as we share our current classroom work. From blogging about my topics at school this year, for the first time my network has brought resources and ideas to me. Not as a result of me asking, but because they “read a post a few weeks back that I was doing sealife”. If we are all more aware of what topics colleagues are doing in their classes our sharing of ideas and resources can be more purposeful.

It will be intriguing to see what develops with mycurriculum.com from the QCDA and whether it will be able to build the critical mass of users to make it truly worthwhile – and also if it is smart enough to do some of the things I have outlined.

It has been an interesting process getting these ideas down in a post – let me know what you think of them and if they would have value in the educational world we work in. The ideas are there, feel free to go ahead and make them, just let me know you have so I can use them.

I have had a fantastic week returning to classroom blogging and starting our new class blog >> Priestsic5. Before Christmas I wrote a post asking for teachers to share their experiences with class blogs. To explain what platform they were using and to share some reasons behind it’s use. As you can see from the link I have decided to use Blogger as our platform.

Why Blogger?

The two main reasons are ease of use and sustainability, and I think that the former directly effects the latter. I want the blog to be a well established feature of the classroom and for it to be sustained into the future. Blogger is extremely easy to setup especially if you have some blogging experience of your own – but even if you have not.

One big plus is the associated services and tools that can be utilised alongside your Blogger (Google) account. The most important is perhaps image hosting in the form of Picasa Web Albums. Used alongside the desktop Picasa 3 application it is a good solution. Amongst other things I can blog directly from Picasa, synchronise local image folders to the web automatically and upload photo videos directly to YouTube.

Synchronise

Just to unpick the image folder synchronisation a little further – on our blog I have created an Art Gallery slideshow in the sidebar. I want this to be a collection of all that the class create and so I will be regularly updating the set of images. Currently all I have to do to add another image to this slideshow is add it to a local folder on my class computer – that’s it. I think this is a really useful feature as we are often managing lots of images from a whole class set of work. Using the Art Gallery example here’s how to do it:

1. Upload you images to your computer, Picasa should automatically pick these up and display them for upload.
2. Create an Art Gallery folder for the images (usually done during upload process)
3. In Picasa next to the folder, on the right hand side of the screen, click the Sync to Web button.
4. Sign in to your Google account.
5. Your images will be uploaded to a web album.
6. Click on the newly created online  album – click on “Link to this Album” in the right sidebar.
7. Select “Embed Slideshow” and copy the code.
8. Paste this code in your blog. For ours I used “Add Gadget” (HTML/Javascript type) from the Layout settings.
9. Save and refresh your blog to check it is working OK – you can manually change the size in the code.
10. Now every time you add an image to the original local folder (on your computer) it will automatically update to the web and consequently update your slideshow too.

In the remainder of the post I will be explaining a few additions and changes I have made to our class blog that I consider to be important.

Next Blog Link

One of the features of a blog with Blogger is the top navigation bar that appears. This has a “Next Blog” link button which takes you to a random blog. Naturally this is not ideal for a class blog as you have no control over what you are linking to.

The first thing I did was find out how to remove it. It is a pretty simple case of adding a small piece of CSS code to the Template code. I found this site’s explanation exactly what I needed. Here is a short screencast from the same website illustrating the process:

Remove Blogger Navbar – More free videos are here

How Many Visitors?

By simply tracking the number of visitors you are able to illustrate to your class that we have an audience. There are people out their in the world reading what we post. These numbers are important in helping you establish rules for writing posts and comments. Children have a better appreciation that their work is going to be viewed by more than just “us”. A visible visitor counter like StatCounter provides some useful analytics for your blog that you could use in maths further down the line

Dots on a Map

In my experience one of the greatest ways to hook your class into the use of the class blog is to display a map of your visitors. In the past and in the last week I have found this to be a great focal point for the class when they are looking at the blog. I have used ClustrMaps for years on my own blog and with classblogs.

It is simply a case of creating an account and then embedding a short piece of code in a blog sidebar. After 12 hours or so the map will begin to be populated with visitor dots. It is these simple marks on a map that become points of intrigue for the children in your class. After 24 hours of our own blog we had about 400 hits – I displayed the full screen map and just listened to the children pointing at the different countries and chatting about where their visitors were from. There was a buzz of excitement.

There is something so powerful and yet so simple and wonderful in allowing your class to realise that those little dots are people who have just visited your blog and read about work you do in your classroom. They begin to realise the connections we can make and begin to develop an awareness of things beyond their own community.

I know it is only a little map, but it really is a powerful aspect of class blogs and I would strongly recommend you display something too. Can you think of any other way that your class would willingly look at a world map every day and ask questions about where places are? Have your class blog displayed when the children come in first thing and leave room for their geographical curiosity to shine through. What you do with that natural curiosity afterwards is up to you!

Since then we have started a UK group, with over 120 members and much discussion has taken place. It is that discussion and debate that I want to focus here in this blog post.

Some consider Google to be a heavy handed corporation, riding rough shod over it’s competitors and assimilating those it can’t compete with.  José Picardo wrote about the way the Etherpad situation was handled and points out that:

Google makes its living by offering free services with the only aim of attracting huge amounts of users to whom Google can then show their customers’ adverts and sell their premium services.

My dad used to tell me stories of free cigarettes being given away by tobacco companies outside the school gates to pupils on the way home. Google’s strategy surrounding free web apps for education is very similar: hook’em while they’re young.

He goes on to qualify such a comparison by saying that,

the desired outcome is the same: to get young people conditioned to using a product from an early age.

Marketing Google Apps for Education is a long term strategy to bring in younger users of Google tools, to create habits in work and life so that eventually more ads can be clicked, maybe years later. That’s surely the bottom line.

So is it right that we are using Google tools at all in the classroom? I rarely get into this sort of territory but we have been using Google tools in a myriad of ways in the classroom and I think it is worth debating.

Google logo render – Mark Knol by mark knol
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Many people have questioned whether a GTA is a good thing as we may just be perpetuating the “Googlisation of Education“, as Josie Fraser puts it. Is it right to hold a professional development event purely based on one company’s products, especially one that reaps a huge proportion of it’s revenue through adverts?

On the other hand Google has produced some of the most powerful learning tools currently available in the classroom. A GTA in the UK would be a great opportunity for teachers to learn from each other and find out about best practices.

The event should be clearly focused on learning and the ways that Google tools can enhance that. But it would also be a good opportunity to further debate the title of this blog post and the privacy issues surrounding Google in education and the ways young learners use their products.

I would focus on the ideas and the learning at such an event and not get too bogged down with whether or not it is right or wrong.  Are you going to stop using Google products in the classroom altogether based on your moral objections? I would prefer to see Google tools and services just one part of a broad and balanced approach to web products in the classroom. Perhaps the event should be similarly balanced – but then it wouldn’t be a GTA it would be just another conference and could be about thousands of web related products.

What do you think? Is a Google Teacher Academy a morally flawed concept or a long overdue professional development event for UK teachers?

(Read Google Squared: A Complete Guide for more information about how to use it in the classroom.)

Ponte stretto by DanielaNob 
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

As it is still in the Labs I think it is important to contribute in a small way to the changes that could take place so based on my classroom experiences, here are mine:

1. Search for values and add back to the square - would be great for children to decide that the presented values are not accurate enough, go to a regular search and then have a little button beside the source to ADD TO SQUARE.
2. Change source for images too – when values have other possible sources we can change them. Sometimes the image is not as useful or appropriate as it could be. Would be useful to change the source or select a different image. Would also be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing for the images.
3. Confidence rate the data used – some of the values presented show a confidence rating, would be useful for us to be able to rate that info too. If it isn’t relevant to the search we have done then we can say.
4. Colour change for added search – when you “Add to Square” it would be useful to be able to have a visual cue to the separate searches you have added.
5. Embed - would be great to be able to grab the code to embed the Square in a blog or other site. You can do it from the exported Spreadsheet but would be nice to be able to add it straight from the Square.
6. Send the Square – would like to be able to grab the link or email directly from the Square.
7. Suggest a category from a duff search- rather then having to build from scratch after a duff search – it would be good if Squared was able to suggest a category from what you added. Did you mean…
8. Other media – please add Youtube and audio clips – we have been looking at Whales using Squared and would have been great for the class to see and hear these amazing animals right there in the search results. Maybe you could add Twitter as well – tweets from users about the category. “I just saw a humpback whale on our boat trip…”
9. Description source – changing the source of the description would be useful to allow greater access to the text. Especially useful when using Simple Wikipedia for example. Perhaps you could also change language as well for the whole Square.
10. Fix the Image insert for exported spreadsheets – when a Square is exported to a Google Spreadsheet the image appears as the URL. As Spreadsheets supports images it would be great to see these right there in the sheet so what you Square is exactly what you export.

I hope that the engineers at Google find them useful. Please let me know how you think Google Squared might be improved, especially in light of classroom experience.

In my opinion it is vital that we don’t just assume that primary school children, who have grown up with “Google” as a verb, can search internet content effectively.

In July last year Google search engineers recorded 1 trillion unique URLs that they indexed, and that was more than a year ago. The amount of information at our pupil’s fingertips is amazing. Sometimes it is too much.

I think Google Squared is a great addition to classroom searching as it provides well needed structure to those search results. It doesn’t just provide a list of sites to click on but a grid of types of information. Google Squared is limited to the types of search terms that can be “Squared” but I think the added structure is a huge benefit to the experience of finding information.

For this post I have produced a series of screenshots and will highlight some of the unique features of searching internet content in this way to help you get the most from Google Squared in the classroom.

(The Flickr slideshow is best viewed in fullscreen)

Information Validity

When a cell isn’t populated with results it provides a great opportunity to explore and teach information validity. We not only need to help children develop their search skills to connect with information, we need to model and teach how to judge the quality of what we see. Just because it is online doesn’t mean it is any good, accurate or indeed useful.

With a regular Google search you will always get results. Using Google Squared often leaves you with gaps in the Square. This is a good thing. These gaps in the search results allow children the opportunity to make decisions about what should be included. We have been using Google Squared during our “Whale Week” and children had to engage much more directly with the information in these gaps, then they would with a regular Google search results.

One example that occurred in class last week was whether a Blue Whale would live for just 10 years or nearly 100 according to the Google Squared results. With some support we were able to see that most of the other values provided for whales were over 50 years and so we were able to define what was most appropriate. Another example was the length of one of the whales, which suggested it was over 100 metres! On closer inspection it showed we found it was referring to the USS Narwhal – a submarine!

Try this search for the wives of Henry VIII and see if you can spot the anomaly. These inaccuracies should be embraced as great opportunities to help illustrate information validity.

Measures

Although there is an option to automatically standardise the units of measurement in any given column – the maths that is involved to convert these would be a great activity.

A search for Bridges provides the ideal range of data for such a task. Children could change the Longest Span, Height or Total Length to KM or M. Other good examples include Cruise Ships, Skyscrapers and Super Cars (Super cars results all seem to be in millimetres which is great to do some conversion into centimetres and metres)

Building a Square

For the average classroom I think Google Squared provides a great opportunity to explore and learn about the very act of searching – not just viewing the results. Building a Square of results should be considered a learning outcome in it’s own right.

I think that this would be a great learning activity because of the way the children would have to engage with the validity of the results, the way it can be built from scratch and the choices a child would have to make to refine the accuracy of their work.

Your challenge today is to build me a Google Square showing me as much as you can about 3D Shapes.

More Search Ideas

The Google Search Curriculum provides lots of valuable resources for regular Google searches. It provides basic, intermediate and advanced lessons for three different modules:

• Understanding Search Engines
• Web Search Technique and Strategies
• Google Web Search Features

I believe that Google Squared would be a worthy addition to this “curriculum” because it is not only a search tool, it provides the structure and choice to help children become better at judging the quality of information online. Most importantly it allows children to directly interact with search results as they build their square.

Why not explore some alternative search engines for the classroom in this Interesting Ways to Use resource.

If you haven’t looked at Google Squared before I strongly recommend you take some time to explore it. I hope that some of the ideas and screenshots in this post give you some inspiration to use it with your own classes, let me know how it would be included in your work.

In this post I wanted to quickly summarise some Google related developments that have caught my eye recently and may have an impact on the classroom.

Google Search Curriculum

This was announced during the recent NECC conference in Washington DC (Checkout these Google related presentations from the NECC conference). When I first saw this Tweeted I thought it would be a bit obvious, but clearly there is much more to it when teaching it in the classroom.

There are three modules covered: Understanding Search Engines, Web Search Technique and Strategies and Google Web Search Features. Each course has lesson plans that are detailed and differentiated: Basic, Intermediate and Advanced.

Furthermore the lesson plans provide a variety of links to specifically created presentations that support the lesson. For each lesson there is reference to the ISTE Standards for Pupil and Teacher. I have not used these before but they look straight forward enough and would be easy to tie into what is happening here in the UK, whether skills based or through the National Curriculum.

My Year 5 children are very good at using online resources to find information but I think that they could be much more adept. They could certainly cope with the the Advanced level lessons and I think there is lots to offer, especially in the third module about different types of searches as it doesn’t take much to scratch the surface beyond a basic keyword search.

They have been created by teachers and seem to be well worth a look and I hope to find some room next year to incorporate some of the ideas.

Apps Education Community

The support for Google Apps Ed users has finally graduated out of Google Groups and now has its own dedicated community space. (Powered by Google Sites of course) It is early days yet but they have currently added areas for:

Tutorials & Tips - “View videos and tutorials on how you can use Google Apps at your school and in the classroom. Have an idea? Submit your own tips & tricks!” Not much here at the moment other than existing Google tools videos. There is a link to a webinar about Ed Apps that goes into great detail about the tools and platform available. I think the idea is that users will begin to generate video content – maybe I should resurrect some of my ideas and stick them in a film!

Join the discussion – “Participate in the Community Forum by reading posts, asking questions, helping others, and choosing and sharing the best answers to your questions.”

Google Apps in Action – “Vote and submit on the best examples of using Google Apps in education.” An interesting concept using the Google Moderator tool. Submit an idea and then the community are meant to vote on it. Yet to see really whether it works, I suppose the better ideas will surface to the top.

Along with being able to add your own details to a map, you can also stay up to date with Ed Apps news and spread the word about the site.

One feature that is worth looking at is the Apps Lesson Plans, a link is provided on the left menu. Each lesson plan is linked to a Google tool if appropriate and although they may not all be appropriate for all age ranges, it is worth looking at some of the ideas and concepts explored. This will certainly help you to find the most appropriate ways to use the tools in the classroom.

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.

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.

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