Posts tagged Wiki

Google Earth Wikispace UPDATE

0
5 years ago
by tombarrett in

Just uploaded some more resources to the wikispace:

Geography QCA Unit 15: The mountain environment

Please visit and add your school’s location to the list and any other resources you have!

What fun we had…

3
5 years ago
by tombarrett in ,

Today we had a planned session in using Bubblr. It was GREAT !! And I would recommend the use of this little site with a whole class to any teachers out there. It was simple and worked a treat… (Take a look at my previous post explaining what Bubblr is)
If you will permit me I will explain what all the fuss is about.

We have been looking at Roald Dahl’s Matilda this week and I thought a simple activity for Bubblr would be to choose some pictures and let the children add them to the Bubblr strip and then simply add text, speech and thought bubbles. Nothing complex or anything to do with order – just to play with the interface and get used to it.
But the beauty is in the simple way the images are accessed by the children. All I did was upload them to our class Flickr account. The children search in Bubblr for our user name “priestsic6″ and there we have it – all of the images in our account with the most recently uploaded heading up the scrollable list for the children to work with.

The Bubblr strips were published and then if you click on the “BLOG THIS” button you can copy the code for embedding it. I asked the children to go to our class wikispace and embed the Bubblr strips into our literacy page. With their prior knowledge from doing the Quikmaps lesson they coped really easily with it. I was suitably impressed with how adaptable the children are. As I was walking around the suite there was that great buzz when everyone is on task and they are really enjoying such a simple but great activity.

Please let me know if anyone wants any more details about the activity or how to set it up yourself.
This one’s a keeper… :)

Bubblr + Quikmaps

5
5 years ago
by tombarrett in , ,

Thanks to Doug Belshaw for making me get on and write this after he pinged my Bubblr post. There are people who are reading my blog :)

My Bubblr and Quikmaps idea is essentially an extension of a History activity I did with my class of Year 6 kids – they added photos to a quikmap placemark, we then embedded them in our wikispace (see my post about the lesson)

Bubblr is a comic strip creator – once these have been made they can also be added to a Quikmap placemark. See an example I made quickly here.

They can also be emedded into a class wikispace like this one.

All you do is click on BLOG THIS after you have published the Bubblr strip – then copy the first set of code and add it into a placemark in Quikmaps.

I have noticed that Bubblr works much better with Internet Explorer than my usual Firefox – so I would recommend to switch to work with it.

We packed lots in today…

0
5 years ago
by tombarrett in , , , , ,

It has been a busy day for ICT in my classroom today – ususally is on a Tuesday as we have our time over in the ICT suite. Anyway I will try and explain everything we did.

Google Earth – Where are we today?
Did this slightly differently today as I explained to the children I had found the location of some people who had commented on our class blog. So I started looking down on the earth from afar and very slowly zoomed into Sydney and Canada respectively. We then looked closely at Sydney and loaded a 3D model of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge – we even zoomed onto the bridge and panned along it, on the model there are even tiny cars and bikes – I said to the kids it was a good way to start the day – driving along Sydney Harbour Bridge!
Mayomi
Used this great visual mindmapping tool/site today to explore what we had learned so far in our 2D Shape work. Really simple to use when combined with a IWB and wireless keyboard which I used today.

Unfortunately there is no way to embed the map into your own site which would be great so I am going to explore whether I can hack some code to embed the mindmap into a wikispace.

RSS / Newsfeeds for Headlines
Just mentioned this today as we have been looking at newspapers and a journalistic style in our work. I had seen something on a blog before about it, but I just explained what RSS is and how we can get newsfeeds really easily. I think that it is very important to explore how different literacy and news is today – not just broadsheets and tabloids anymore, but a more fluid style of news that is much more personalised.

I just used the “Latest Headlines” bookmark on my Firefox toolbar to show them, we then just guessed from the headline what the news story was about.

Also briefly looked at Headline History which is cracking site I hope to use agin this year.

Quikmaps and our class Wikispace
I was a really happy bunny this afternoon as I knew that I had set my children a challenge, and they rose to it so well! Basically my Year 6 children had made a Quikmap (see previous post about the activity), powered by Google Maps, and then embedded the map into our class wikispace. It looks great! Take a look over on the history pages on our Wikispace. Scroll down and wait for the maps to load – don’t forget to click on the placemarks to see the work the children have done and why it is under History.
It also helped me to understand some of the practical problems that occur when you have lots of concurrent authors of the same space. Look out for some details soon.

Classroom Google Earth WIKISPACE NOW LIVE!

2
5 years ago
by tombarrett in

I have just posted to my new wikispace for using Google Earth in the classroom – I will endeavour to gradually transfer some of my resources from the GE Forum site.

http://classroomgoogleearth.wikispaces.com

Please visit and contribute if you can. Thanks.

My Quikmaps lesson

7
5 years ago
by tombarrett in

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.

This idea popped into my head in the middle of the night…

1
5 years ago
by tombarrett in ,

They seem to do that a lot. I can’t help but think over a few ideas as I drift off to sleep and I was mulling over the use of old and new photographs that we have been doing in our local history. I wanted to explore the use of GPS and geotagging to help us locate some of the old pictures. Well basically what I have come up with is a conceivable set of Geography/History/ICT based activities that would be great to do.

You would need.

  • GPS Receivers – hand held X 5 (one per group)
  • Network copy of Robogeo (geotagging software)
  • Digital cameras – X 5 (one per group)
  • Copies of old photos laminated to be taken out with you
  • Optional: portable mp3 recording equipment; iPod, iRiver

Prior to taking the children out you would need to locate whereabouts the old photographs have been taken and add these as placemarks into all 5 GPS devices – or you could just record the placemarks and ask the children to enter the lat and long as part of the task. (This task is assuming there has been some prior work using GPS devices within the school grounds for example)
So what would the task involve? I will break it into different steps. Essentially the main learning objective are

  • To understand and recognise the changes that have occured over time to different locations in your local area.
  • Use GPS and geotagging software to accurately locate the old photographs onto a modern day map.

The activities would be in this order:

  1. Locate each GPS placemark and match it to one of the old photographs the children have with them.
  2. At the exact location take an identical phtotgraph using the cameras – take time to frame the photograph exactly as the older one was taken.
  3. (After completing all of the photographs) Return to an ICT suite connect both GPS device and camera to computer and load Robogeo software. Match up each placemark (lat and long) from GPS to the photographs. [This can be done for the new set of photographs as well as the older set.]
  4. Export the finished work into many different formats: Google Earth, Google Maps, to flickr. Embed the map into a class wikispace.
  5. An added feature of RoboGEO is the ability to associate an audio file with the image. The audio files could be recorded using an iPod or other mp3 device and loaded onto the PC as well.

The activities might need a bit of support but they are certainly not out of reach for upper KS2 children.I am not sure how many primary schools own there own GPS devices though!

Bubblr

4
5 years ago
by tombarrett in

This is a lovely little app that could prove to be very useful. As the site suggests Bubblr is:

…a tool to create comic strips using photos from flickr.com. Begin searching images and add bubbles to them. So easy! Just type a tag and and press go!

The specific aspect I really like is the way that you can search for a username in flickr so that you only see those photos. If a class has an account it then allows a classteacher to direct children to a certain resource and certain images to use.

The comic strips are very simple to create as you drag images to a dynamic timeline structure and this linear style scrolling comic book is what you would get when published. Bubbles for speech, thought and just text are available to add and move, add text to. I found it really easy to organise and it could have many uses – for example it would be a good way to illustrate a historical timeline.

Once again the published resource can be embedded into other sites including a wikispace - unfortunately I cannot embed it into a learnerblog for the class blog which is a great shame and I am finding that there are seemingly too many limitations to what can be achieved in the learnerblog environment.

EditGrid

1
5 years ago
by tombarrett in

After exploring a whole raft of web 2.0 applications I have been thinking about the application of EditGrid‘s spreasheets that can be shared online. I certainly think that they have the capacity to change the way that spreadhsheets are taught or at least to add an extra collaborative strand. And I suppose I started to think how could the primary ICT curriculum be covered in the use of Web 2.0 apps? Probably pretty well!

Anyway EditGrid allows you to create a spreadsheet (which by the way is a simplified version of excel) and then share your work as you would a Wikispace - I suppose it is a wikisheet; or a spreadwiki or a sheetwikispread!! These spreadsheets can then perhaps be embedded into a class wiki – using the embed media button at wikispaces.
The obvious use would be to deliver much of the spreadsheets curriculum for Year 5 and 6 – but I really like the RTU or Real Time Update feature of it that allows you to see real time changes. I think that simultaneous maths lessons with either whole classes or small groups working together on the same workspace may be an interesting option. There is also the possible use of the spreadsheet between schools in different locations.

Maybe there is someone out there willing to do that ?

My class wiki

1
5 years ago
by tombarrett

I have begun a class wiki over at wikispaces.com. I have already added a few tasks that came to mind – something about the RE work we have done, something on the Local History study [I imagine this being linked with some internet based research] and also a literacy task I have called “Let’s write a Biography together”.

I have also joined a couple of Google groups to keep tabs on what educational wikis are doing – I think that it will be an interesting resource for the class.

Based upon the number of comments and posts on the class blog I think that I will offer a time during the week at school to blog using the school computers.

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