Category: Google Earth

Thankyou to Highwood Infant School

Google Earth, INSET, IWB, Mapping, My class, SMARTboardsPublished onLeave a Comment on Thankyou to Highwood Infant School

I spent most of today attending an INSET day at Highwood Player Infants School talking to them about using their IWBs which they have just had installed.

Many thanks to everyone at the school for inviting me and making me feel so welcome I hope that some of my ideas provide a springboard for your school’s IWB development.

Apart from the resources I planned to discuss we spoke about and used a range of other material. Below I have tried to record most of those thoughts from the morning:

  • Artrage 2 – a fantastic art package ideal for the use on the interactive whiteboard. Look out for more on this soon, here on my blog as I will be introducing the use at my school and planning some training.
  • Microsoft Local Live – we looked at the school and Highwood Player had really clear imagery from the “bird’s eye view” setting. Would be useful to look at before short walks or local area studies.
  • Quikmaps – Another mapping site that allows you to scribble and add placemarks. Again would be to look at before short walks or local area studies.
  • BBC Little Animal Activity Centre – we had a read of the animated books and phonic activities.
  • Google Earth – just mentioned this briefly but a wonderful tool that I am huge fan of. Read the rest of my blog for more information.
  • Topmarks Educational Website Search Engine – very handy when looking for something specifically aimed at schools.

Please follow the links above to the relevant sites.

Further down my blog, you will have to scroll a bit, there is the notes from the session with the links from the images. Please feel free to print these and use in school.

mswordNotes from session (handout)
mswordFerry Halim Guidance
vnd.ms powerpointPowerpoint of Year 2 Instructional writing work (ordering digital images)

I would really appreciate it you could take some time to leave me some feedback about the training session – scroll to the bottom of this post (or the one further down) and find the word “Comments” click on it and leave me your thoughts.

I really value your feedback and remarks so that in the future and can take them into account for other similar training sessions. Thanks again.

WIKI on Google Earth in the classroom

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Yesterday I started a Wikispace on the uses of Google Earth in the classroom – http://classroomgoogleearth.wikispaces.com

I have only just grabbed the name so there is nothing to look at yet but I will try and transfer some the ideas and kml/kmz files from the GE Forum – I only need 42 more views until I hit 13,000 total views of my GE stuff 🙂 still no contributions though 🙁  Make sure you check it soon.

Extension activity in Maths today

Google Earth, Literacy, Maths, My classPublished onLeave a Comment on Extension activity in Maths today

Further to our work on Mina’s journey using Google Earth – I asked some children who had completed the standard addition sums in their maths books to calculate the different distances of Mina’s travels. They used the measure tool in GE 4 to plot her journey from major city to major city – they then applied the addition strategies to work out her total approximate distance.

Dracula – shared writing in Google Earth

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To model the writing process in the literacy lesson we do something called shared writing and this week we used Google Earth as a platform for this. We are currently studying Dracula and we looked at Mina Murray’s journey to track Jonathan Harker her fiance. She travelled from Hull to Hamburg and through Europe to Budapest, there are obvious geographic uses of GE but we also used the placemarks to write her diary entries as she left England behind and ventured into the wilds of Transylania.

The children were enthralled and it just gave the writing that little bit more purpose – they then went off and wrote some similar emotions as she travelled.

Google Earth – Where are we today?

Google Earth, Mapping, My classPublished on7 Comments on Google Earth – Where are we today?

I came up with this activity at about 8.55am this morning as my class was coming in. So I decided to do it with them. I chose a city and zoomed down to street level, but so you could see a few miles worth of the city.

I then asked them to guess where we were. I then realised we could play a 10 questions type game – where they have only 10 questions to guess the name of the city. It was great fun and soon they were firing away with the questions.

  1. Is it in the UK?
  2. Is it in Australia?
  3. Is it Athens?
  4. Does the city have any famous buildings?

Wow! This last question blew me away for about 9.00am in the morning – so I answered, “Yes it has some very famous historic buildings you might know.” Well it didn’t take long for a couple of children to guess it was Rome.

I then zoomed out a little and switched on the 3D Buildings network link (only in Google Earth 4) and we looked at the Collosseum. The children were enthralled as we panned and zoomed into the ancient structure. We even navigated so we were standing on one of the terraces of the great amphitheatre. Well the “wows” soon spread through the room – personally this sort of technology should be doing that.

There is nothing quite like starting the day with a “WOW”

We have to remember we are just looking at our planet, but it is Google Earth that allows us such easy and unique access to these wonders.
258541478 bf343a0e5c

So I got to thinkin’ as you do…how can I extend this game a little. So how about if the children were able to exchange a question for a certain amount of zoomed altitude! So the children only have 9 questions to figure out the answer and I zoom further our by say 2000ft Will it help or will they lose the detail they need? Risky…

What about exchanging 5 questions for a 3D model of a building in the city somwhere? Will they know the building? Will it help? Can they then ask questions about the building? (Will I even know the answers at 9.00am in the morning!!)

We posted to our blog where we had been and I must say we all had a great start to our Monday.

So where will we go tomorrow…?