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.
Online mapping technologies now play an integral part in my teaching toolkit. Google Maps has allowed many developers the access to a high quality mapping resource that has then spurned mashups or other applications. Quikmaps is a great tool taking advantage of Google Maps at its core – notes and placemarks can easily be dragged onto the map and even images and video footage can be inserted using simple html. These maps can then be saved and even embedded into a class wikispace. We have been exploring our local history and a key activity for my Year 6 children (10-11 year olds) will be to place historic photographs of our town on a modern map. This can be easily achieved through the use of Google Maps and Quikmaps.
