Create the space for dialogue
Since I emailed yesterday I have already had many responses to my Wiki which has been great. Dale Jones from the Mary Webb School has emailed me some great advice and experience from work in Shropshire.
I contacted John from Sandaig Otters and he has already been really helpful, I hope that his expertise can help with the start of our class blog.
This app won me over straight away. Over a year ago when I started to use GE I could see massive potential in just being able to see the world in an instant. So I set about making some resources and clearly the first things that came to mind are the geographical uses of the programme. I decided to start posting them on the GE Forum under UK Primary Curriculum and people started to look at it.
I produced some Google Earth resources for “Village life in India” which is a Geography QCA unit. Staff at my school used it with great success in Year 5 and it was a simple resource including locations of the school, county, country, continents and the village itself. I also added in an overlay of a more detailed map showing Chembakoli. Simple stuff but it had a great impact on the children and was a great teaching tool.
The resources I produced just stemmed from there really, my only problem… not enough time to produce and develop the ideas I had. But someone was looking – there have been over 12,000 views on my forum since I began.
I think that the most successful resource I have made, has been the BBC Planet Earth work. The TV series was quite amazing and when I found that much of the video content had been made available online via the BBC website I used it to illustrate the whereabouts of the different aspects of nature in GE.
The only disappointing thing is that although there have been many people viewing there has not been any contributions of content from UK teachers.
Well I think that I should really talk about some of the ideas I have had in the past. They have never been written down anywhere and anything that was worthy was just done or resources just made. So please excuse the post-dating of some entries.
I have just had a couple of emails from Heather Govier over at NAACE to ask if I could contribute an article to there Focus magazine on Personalised Learning about the results and progress of the Wiki I have started and the class blogging. I think that this will be a good opportunity to highlight the whole process of blogging from it’s start. I think that a diary type style would be useful – probably just similar to the entries I will add in this blog. Should be fun.
Thanks to Barbara Ainscough there have been 2 new ideas on the Wiki already. Wow that was fast!