GE Archives - Tom Barrett

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 3: Consolidate and Empower

TomGoogle Earth, Laptops, Literacy, MappingNovember 25, 2008April 22, 20196 Comments

Photo by debaird
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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.

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

We wouldn’t have been as successful if it wasn’t for about 6-8 children in each class who became the experts. These children had completed the tasks set them and had a very good understanding for what we had done. They knew their way around Google Earth. I would encourage you to seek these children out and empower them to support their peers.

The class experts for the saving routine above, were simply those who had been successful – I just called upon them to go and support someone else doing it. They were willing and supportive with their peers and guided them rather than taking over an important difference which I am always pointing out. This supportive ethos has always been with us as we help the children to understand how to problem solve with their class laptop resource. We try to encourage them to ask two other class member to help before talking to an adult.

Quick round-up

The slightly tricky nature of local content in Google Earth and saving work can cause younger children to get a bit disorientated.
Take plenty of time with younger students to demo and walkthrough the save process to a network folder.
With panes and folders open or closed the views can be very different on different machines so it is worth having confident children to help support their peers and to try and pre-empt some issues.
As everyone in this set of activities is altering the same placemarks, multiple copies can arise and can confuse. Ensure the children only have one set of placemarks checked.
Take time to consolidate Google Earth skills and confidence – use outside of the writing time and just allow them to explore. Reinforce the basic layout and structures.
Encourage a general sense of independence in problem solving – ask 2 friends for help before an adult. Do not underestimate the impact low level informal peer support can have on a technology rich lesson or environment.
Empower those confident students to actively support their peers, call them experts and make them feel special.

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 2: Add your Voice

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, Mapping, VoicethreadNovember 24, 2008April 22, 20197 Comments

Your talent scouting has hopefully provided you with a great location for your class narrative and perhaps you have even plotted the journey the main protagonists will take during the tale. What’s next? Today we continued our Google Earth storytelling as we added audio to the placemarks.

In my opinion children’s writing, whether digital or otherwise, can be greatly improved through the use of purposeful speaking and listening activities about the narrative prior to doing any individual work. Photostory and online resources like Voicethread provide us with a great set of tools to allow technology to further impact in this process. My aim in planning this unit was to include audio within the children’s Google Earth placemarks, I wanted their rehearsed, spoken parts of the story right in the place it happens.

Noel Jenkins must have been on my wavelength as at much the same time he posted on the excellent Digital Geography about the use of Vocaroo and audio notes in Google Earth. Vocaroo is simply ideal for classroom use and it could not be any easier to use. No login or sign-up, no profile or saved content – just hit record and then grab the code to embed elsewhere. Here is how to add audio to a GE placemark.

My class of 30 9/10 year olds went through this process today as we explored the 6 placemarks in the story we wanted to use for the story. I wanted to keep these the same for everyone so that we had some control over what people were doing and so that we could also share ideas amongst the class. They found the process simple, the audio is not great, but it is so easy to do it’s worth it. The Vocaroo site held up very well with 30 children working on it at much the same time.

It was a great lesson and the children will have some more time tomorrow refining their audio and perhaps adding a second piece of audio improving and building upon the sentences they did today. I worked with a small group of boys on a shared story – we had so much fun telling parts of the escape and adding chicken sound effects for the location in the last image above. I encourage you to give this a try and the clear potential for a huge variety of stories situated in Google Earth is boundless!

The next steps will be to refine some of the audio as I said and to begin to add some written text in the placemark that is scaffolded by the use of the Vocaroo recordings.

This is part 2 of a series of posts documenting our Google Earth Storytelling unit.

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 1: Find a location, Begin a journey

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, MappingNovember 23, 2008April 22, 20197 Comments

This is a series of posts about the use of Google Earth as a platform for my students to write. It was first inspired by the 21 Steps by Charles Cumming highlighted by Ewan McIntosh in a seminar at the Scottish Learning Festival.

For a while I have been keen to take advantage of, and further explore, Google Earth for writing and this series of posts will document the unit we are currently running in our classes which is a piece of a wider digital narrative jigsaw.

Be a Location Scout

I wanted to dispense with the written plan for this unit and begin with a location and journey that could be plotted on Google Earth. For a while I thought about coming up with a fictional context for our work but in the end I decided that the amount of work we had already done on Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach would give the children comfort and confidence.

The first step is to find a suitable location in Google Earth for your writing context. I was looking for a house on a hill, near to the sea, that in the story was owned by Aunt Sponge and Spiker. It may feel like a needle in a haystack but really you are spoilt for choice! You have to become a location scout for your upcoming writing, and spending a little time finding the right place will pay dividends.

I soon decided that we were going to write the story of James escaping from his Aunts’ house and the surrounding area needed to provide a location for the story. I found a location with a small town at the foot of the hill and realised this was ideal. Take a look at the house in this Google Earth file.

This is the file I shared with my class – they opened it and explored the surrounding area for possible escape routes. We discussed as a class suitable hiding places: old buildings, bushes, cattle sheds. The children highlighted these on the SMARTBoard so we could share them as a class. With more built up areas the layers of information you can add in Google Earth could aid the children’s discovery of plot ideas.

It was important for me to continually bring it back to the fact that we are going to tell the story here, in Google Earth, this was our planning. We were exploring possible plot lines together and I would discuss possible sentences with the class – this helped them to focus on the escape story. The children responded really well to the visual, spatial idea for planning a story.

Plot Your Story’s Journey

The next step for us was to plot the escape route for James and I wanted the children to explore this themselves. After a brief demonstration of how to use the path tool in Google Earth the children went off and plotted ideas for escape routes on their laptops. It was liberating for the children to be planning their story in this way – I witnessed lots of speaking and listening as they talked through escape ideas and situations that might arise as the Aunts give chase.

To maintain a clear class focus we worked together to plot a journey from the house to James’ eventual escape. As we plotted the journey James would take on foot away from the house we made decisions on the fly about which way he would turn and which places he may stop and hide – all of the time picking up on ideas or locations the children recognised. The location was helping us define the story – the children were not just trying to dream something up.

A building site in the town offered us a great opportunity for escape and we even stopped and hunkered down between two parked lorries. I zoomed in and talked to the class about what they could imagine seeing and hearing – we spoke of the dust and mud on the large tyres and the sound of workmen nearby. All of which I hope will enrich their writing.

The building site led to an idea for his escape and as a class we decided that he would not continue on foot but conceal himself in a nearby lorry, which would eventually drive away from the Aunts and take him to safety in the next town. You can see the journey we plotted in this Google Earth file.

The children will now be adding audio to the journey and begin to talk through their escape stories. It is clear from this example that the opportunities for children’s fiction being inspired by and driven by a location is huge. It should be an interesting week of work with the class.

Geotagging images using Google Earth

TomGoogle EarthFebruary 27, 2008Leave a Comment

This afternoon we embarked upon the most challenging technology related work we have done to date in Year 5. The children are 4th graders, 9 or 10 years old.
Recently we all went to Perlethorpe Activity Centre to support our work on rivers – we measured the velocity and profile of the River Meden, as well as enjoying a lovely sunny walk around the grounds of Thoresby Hall. As we walked round I snapped away some pictures and this afternoon we had the opportunity to geotag them in Google Earth(GE).

The children have used GE many times already this year, so I decided to take advantage of this knowledge as opposed to using Google Maps or Quikmaps as I have done in the past. The geotagging work ties nicely into their ongoing map skills development and is a good conclusion to the visit.

This video clip is one of the children completing the process of embedding an image from Flickr into a GE placemark, using the correct written code. (<img src=””>)It certainly was a challenge for the children but once they had written the code a number of times, and often corrected their mistakes, they were flying.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-5612066013521995380" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

Here is what you have seen Kyle do in a step by step guide.

Find an image stored somewhere online, study it carefully and try to pick up on any clues as to where it is. Remember when you geotag an image it should really be located where the photographer was standing when it was taken, not the subject of the image.
Copy the location or url of the image – in Firefox you can just right click and “Copy Image Location”. IE take the URL from “Properties”
Now navigate back to your new placemark in GE. Make sure you are looking at the properties window – you will add the code in the “description” part.
If you just paste the address it will not display the image because you have not told the map to retrieve anything, it will just return a link. You need to add in a little code.
All you need to do is ensure the image URL is encoded with the highlighted parts in the example below.
<img src=”alovelypicture.online.234.jpg“>
Now click OK. If you click on the placemark it should open up with the image inside.
When embedding video or other media – just look for the “Blog This” option, and paste the generated code straight into the placemark balloon. Google video can be added pretty easily in this way.

The visual / spatial skills needed to correctly place an image on a map is an interesting one to explore. The children were looking very closely at what clues the image revealed as to the exact whereabouts of it.

I told the children that they would have had a successful afternoon if they could embed just one image in a placemark at the correct location. But, just as they often do, the children ran with it and tagged many pictures correctly on the map. A challenging but ultimately successful afternoon of GE mapping work.

(I will add a link to some example KMZ work as well as a Google Map of our work from today when I can.)

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Google Earth is our Paper – Part 3: Consolidate and Empower

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 2: Add your Voice

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 1: Find a location, Begin a journey

Geotagging images using Google Earth