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Google Earth is Our Paper – Part 5: A Week in Review

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, MappingDecember 1, 2008April 22, 20198 Comments

Our week of storytelling in Google Earth has finished however I wanted to wrap up my reflections on working in this way. In this post I look back over the process and review the benefits you will reap and any challenges that you may face in implementing a similar unit.

A piece of Google Earth storytelling is definitely manageable within a week (5-6 hours) and in that sense is very flexible. The completed outcome from each child was a set of 6 placemarks that included:

An embedded Vocaroo audio snippet of a rehearsed and planned piece of the story from James’ point of view.
A written sentence that was a second draft of that first audio clip. An improved version that built in the language work we had done as a class to support the story.

You can see these two story elements in this screenshot of a child’s work.

If you would like to hear the audio, see the other 5 placemarks and the work as a whole then you can download the KMZ file here. During the week I worked with a supported literacy group and here is the audio work we completed together.

Challenges of digital storytelling in Google Earth

Saving – this has been the biggest issue for us as the children will encounter temporary files saved locally in Google Earth. This is especially true when working on different laptops over a period of days. As the placemarks were the same, it led to confusion. If I was to do another unit of work with GE I would ensure that the children save work with their name included and I would also purge the local files at the end of every session. Another option is to explore the use of Google Maps.
Uncertainty – as with most applications the more confident you are as a user the more you will get from it. Google Earth has a lot going on with various menus, folders and windows. The children often ran into a sticky spot if they could not find the item they were looking for or generally felt unfamiliar with the layout. If I was to repeat this unit again I would probably ensure there has been equivalent hours put in before hand that doesn’t just orientate them to the basics but allows them time to work with files, saving and the various layers of information. This would raise their level of confidence, consequently the layout of Google Earth would not be a hurdle to better storytelling.

Benefits of digital storytelling in Google Earth

Visual – beginning with such a rich visual stimulus as Google Earth imagery gives the children such a different experience of storytelling then what they are used to. In this unit we benefited as a class not being straight-jacketed to a written, paper based plan. We were free to roam and explore the imagery we had, there were constraints that we agreed, but the plot was there in that imagery waiting for us to tease it out.
Control – the children had control over the way they explored their story. They moved, tilted and zoomed, they controlled how their journey looked to them. I walked around the room during the week and they were all exerting this control over how the narrative space looked to them. I suppose in a small way this personalises the journey for them.
Discovery – we began with a single location, a place I believed would be good to tell our escape story. It needed that decision, but from there we decided as a group what would happen. The snakey line you see in the example files or images could have easily taken us in another direction. The children discovered the elements of the story we included. In the first sessions we explored the local area in pairs and the children noted and discussed possible places of refuge. One child shared with us, by zooming in on the SMARTBoard, the building yard that we eventually chose to hide in as James. At that point int he lesson we had not even decided which way to turn from outside his house – but it was clear that the yard would provide us with lots of opportunities so we included it our escape. Let the children find their path, their journey – let them discover what is out there and allow the plot to be formed as you go.
Embedding Media – Google Earth placemarks allow a whole host of media to be embedded in support of your story. We have added a simple audio player but you could easily have some drama work filmed and uploaded to a video hosting site, then embedded. That would be a great extension to what we have done and not too difficult either.
Geotagged Narrative – beyond the huge variety of imagery children have as a starting point the sense of making your narrative happen in situ really appeals to me. You have to consider the tense that you work in, however the combination of narrative types in one place is a huge benefit to working in Google Earth. You could have written, spoken, filmed and drawn media all in the very location it is occurring.

Where do we go from here?

In my opinion I think that this week has challenged me to think of storytelling in a new way. I think I have a good understanding of digital narrative, but working in Google Earth and defining the plot in response to the environment turns it all on it’s head. My class were not trying to conjure up some bright idea, they were inspired by the images in front of them, by the landscape and make up of the location. Just think of all of those locations…just waiting to be a location for a story. (You could even do one on Mars or The Moon!)

Somewhere local to the school to begin would also be a great starting point – perhaps a trip to somewhere near the school and the children do a recount of the day. I would also like to explore the potential of social stories, children generating small snippets of narrative roughly under the same plotlines, in different placemarks but again in roughly the same location. These could then be shared and the individual child chooses a path for their character to take adding their peers narrative parts to form a whole.

Tear up the paper, be a location scout, let the landscape guide you, tip storytelling upside down and give it a shake – most of all let the children discover their own journey, their own path. You never know where it might lead.

2 Unconferences in One Day

TomProfessional LearningNovember 29, 2008April 22, 20191 Comment

On Thursday I had the opportunity to head down to London to take part in the Amplified’08 event held at NESTA HQ. In addition I was grateful to also be able to attend the MIrandaMod2 unconference at the London Institute for Education.

Network of Networks

The amplification of voices is the intent for Amplified08. Voices that have already come together in their own social networks, to meet face to face and take the use of social media in their fields of work onto the next level. I was in the company of about 200 other professionals who passionately believe in the power of social media, in one form or another, to change what they do. I was pleased to meet Drew Buddie and Leon Cych and between us we flew the flag for education in amongst this wider group.

The session topics were sketched out on the wiki and after a brief introduction by Toby Moores and NESTA we huddled around a whiteboard to find the location for the conversations. I attended a session called “From conscripts to followers – new forms of leadership and organization” that sprung up from a blog reaction by David Terrar to Seth Godin’s book Tribes. I listened to the group talk about current workforce models and how social media has a role to play, how communication streams are different then they were a year ago and how it is possible to utilise them.

I explained to the group that I work with 30 social media experts everyday and then said I was a primary school teacher and that the children were ten. I asked what will the large corporate world do when my class are ready to get into the workforce? I discussed some of the online tools we use and the fact we have a Nintendo Wii in the class and some of the ways we have already used it – I explained that when I talk to the children on their terms and engage with them in a place that they know and enjoy, there is an instant community of use. The children know that I am aware of the ways they use social media and other technologies – they appreciate that it is OK to talk about it and enjoy it.

As with many of these events, or certainly what TeachMeet was built upon, the corridor conversations were also amazingly valuable. After the session I talked with Graham Stewart, Euan Semple and Anne Marie McEwan about the future of Amplified and what might happen. I referred to the fact that I left Glasgow and the TeachMeet at the Scottish Learning Festival feeling inspired and empowered to organise an event of my own. We talked about the level playing field those who use social media are standing on – we can all publish, have a TV or radio station or be a journalist.

I hope that in supporting each other social media and the wider use of online tools can be further leveraged in our professions. I believe that TeachMeet and the wider edtech community in all their glorious guises can exemplify how to use these tools in an open way. The way that we share how we work and our successes is not the same in the corporate arena. It was a privilege to encourage people to think about education in their discussions and all the good that goes on. May the voices of teachers continue to be heard loud and clear.

MirandaMod2

Drew Buddie encouraged me to attend the second unconference organised by MirandNet. It was a quick dash up the road with Drew from NESTA but was a real pleasure to attend and once again exciting to hear about the innovative work going on in classrooms. I was thrilled to also get a chance to meet Dai Barnes and Daniel Needlestone who I have enjoyed talking to in the EdTechRoundUp meetings.

Loosely organised but with a tighter rein then, say a TeachMeet, we had a range of speakers from across the education sector. Leon Cych was in charge of the video stream that went out on UStream and he monitored the chat and twitter feeds as well.

I had a little unplanned stint talking about multi-touch interactive devices and what the future may (already) hold for classroom technology. Rachel Jones the head of education at Steljes (who kindly supported the event with some money for the food and drink) spoke to the group about future classroom designs and how the SMART Table could play a part in collaborative learning. I look forward to working with Rachel in the near future to help ensure the most is made of the SMART Table and to explore the possibilities it and the Durham project brings to the classroom.

My planned talk to the group on the use of Google Earth for writing began with me tipping a laptop on it’s screen and sliding it underneath a visualiser. We had to improvise as my laptop would not connect to the projection system. I talked about the work we have been doing this week in class and how we used the visual support of a location in Google Earth to define our story. It was fun being able to talk and showcase what goes on in my class and another opportunity to reflect on my practice.

Dai Barnes took the floor and talked with great passion about his students work with Alice and Mindmeister – he also did an amazing impromptu demo of how to embed a Google Form in a Moodle page. After the event Leon, Dai, Drew and I had a pint and continued the conversation. Thankyou to MirandaNet for having me and it would be great to attend the next if I can.

Overall it was a great day of sessions, conversations and learning – there was so much to reflect upon and it was inspiring to meet my network face to face. It only serves to strengthen those connections and inspire you further.

Google Earth is our Paper – Part 4: Improve the Story

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, Mapping, VoicethreadNovember 26, 2008April 22, 2019Leave a Comment

In today’s literacy lesson, the third in our Google Earth storytelling unit, we made the leap from audio or spoken parts of the story to some written work.

The use of the mapping in this story has provided us with a structure through the escape route we chose and also it has provided us with a rich visual stimulus for story content. The bushes James has to break through in his bid for freedom have caused scratches and bruises and ripped his clothing. The building site we have seen has caused James to be covered in dust and mud. In our story he hides between two large lorries and we stretched out with our senses (Jedi style!) and saw workmen chatting on a tea break, heard drills banging into the ground and the smell of diesel fumes from machinery. All of this has been generated from studying the satellite imagery in our story location.

Over the last few days we have been working on generating a bank of good vocabulary for the escape, which we have on our WOW WORD display. Through discussion and thesaurus work we have gathered lots of verbs and adjectives that have already proven valuable for the children to use in their stories. We have also tried to generate lots of different alternative sentence openers – many of the recorded audio sentences began with “I”. We used the verbs we had generated and coupled them with adverbs to generate powerful sentence openers. Again these are displayed on the wall for the children to see and use in their work, and in fact many of the improvements made today included many of the examples you can see.

Today the children used this language work to improve the sentences they had begun in their Vocaroo audio. Underneath the code for the Vocaroo player they added <p> for a paragraph and then wrote an improved version of their audio. We encourage them to make small changes to the original sentence, so just add a WOW word or begin the sentence in a more interesting way.

Here is an example of what one of the placemarks looked like and a second image of what the same item had included in the placemark properties. You can listen to the audio for this example here. The children coped well with writing in this way and had no problems with the coding as it is so simple.

The combination of audio and written text has allowed the children to really improve their writing. I have always been very encouraged when the children have used Voicethread and I think that a technology based audio element can be a powerful way to scaffold the writing process.

I believe that in this unit there have been a few ingredients that have contributed to improved storytelling:

Google Earth’s imagery provided the class with ample inspiration for what to be creating in their story – they could see and explore it in front of them. They were not looking at a piece of paper and trying to drum up something.
The confidence and comfort that they have with the main character and the background to the story.
A clear and purposeful backbone to the tale – James is escaping.
An agreed escape route. The whole class can then discuss the various moments in the escape. The sharing and peer support is vital.
Easy audio recording has provided the children with a quick avenue into generating story content. There is no password/login/signup/complex method/knowledge/skill barrier to using Vocaroo. The children were recording their ideas immediately.
Audio and text situated on the image at where it happens in the story brings, often disparate, storytelling elements together.

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

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

Photo by debaird
Attribution-ShareAlike License

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.

Woices and Google Earth for Digital Fiction

TomGoogle Earth, Literacy, Mapping, My class, VoicethreadNovember 1, 2008January 23, 201011 Comments

These are some of the ideas I have been brewing over during my half term break from school. Today I managed to have a great few hours and got 3 solid looking weeks of planning done which incorporate all of these concepts. As the next few weeks pass I will reflect on their effectiveness in the classroom with our classes.

Photostory

Not a particularly new idea as this is a firm favourite for digital storytelling. I have always spoken highly of this simple application from Microsoft because it has such a clearly set out structure to follow. It is particularly beneficial for young children as there is noa chance they will get lost in an open application searching for features or trying to remember how to do things. Photostory is linear in structure and so each step has to be passed by to finish.

We have had success in the past with Photostory so it is familiar territory for the staff in Year 5 but our classes have yet to look at it with us. They had some brief experience with their classes last year but not on the scale we want to use it.

The children will be generating illustrations, clay models, images and paintings to help tell the story of James and the Giant Peach for the first few days. We are not taking on the whole story though, as the children have already written a letter explaining about his early predicament to an imaginary character. We are going to use Photostory to bring that letter to life and make it multi modal in nature. The prior writing will be a good source of support and the children will add audio and narration of their correspondence in this new digital way.

Comiqs

I first came across Comiqs from Steve Kirkpatrick’s excellent blog. There are growing numbers of online comic and cartoon sites but the feature that makes this so useful in the classroom is its simplicity. I am looking forward to mashing up their writing into this different digital form following our Photostory work. The children will have to reappraise their writing and look at the direct speech of characters in more detail due to the comic book genre.

I have contacted Michael at Comiqs regarding multiple logins and just asking advice in general about using it with a class of 30 or even 60 children in total. It is clear that a class sign in system, like Voicethread, is not yet in place so I wanted his opinion – single login for the class or multiple logins. He replied:

Currently, it might be best to use a single login and password for the site. However, managing the photos, etc, would be a bit of an issue. However, we might look into implementing a paid service with better much login and classroom support.

If this is the case it should be interesting looking out for this in the future. I am excited about letting the children loose on Comiqs and know they will enjoy using it for their digital narrative, nonetheless it remains to be seen how well it copes with large amounts of media in a single account, accessed by many children.

Google Earth

During a seminar at the Scottish Learning Festival Ewan McIntosh explained about using Google Earth for narrative in Penguin’s 21 Steps examples from Charles Cumming. The idea struck me that beginning with a journey would be a great way to tell a story and combined with the children’s general confidence around Google Earth it should be a great medium for narrative.

The idea for our own work is using James and the Giant Peach as our launch pad, but taking it in a different direction. I thought today that the class could write his escape from the clutches of his Aunt and to write the ongoing story using placemarks in Google Earth.

I spent some time hunting around for a place in England somewhere that matched the location of the house from the Dahl story. I found somewhere in Dorset I think, on a hill with a thin sliver of sea visible in the distance.

I will show the children how to create a path using Google Earth and talk through James’ possible escape. We will use the real features of the land to help inform the narrative. I will ask the children to write 6-10 parts of the escape story from James’ point of view. Each placemark could form a paragraph and must refer to the real environment around it.

I love the idea of a visual pathway beginning the story rather than traditional plans or notes. I think the children will respond well to this digital form of stroytelling and perhaps we can make it an option in the future for writing narrative. The possibilities are huge for the scope of this work and combined with other information and creative media within Google Earth layers it could really support children’s storytelling. This is the one I am most looking forward to exploring.

Woices

To support the location driven narrative of Google Earth and to provide the children with the opportunity to talk through their writing ideas prior to using GE, I have decided to plan in a few sessions using Woices. This is a geotagging audio site and is meant to be used for recording audio references “echoes” about places in the world, they then can be combined together to form a “walk” of “echoes” with something in common.

An echo is an audio record that is attached to a physical real-world location or object. Echoes are words, left by one person at some precise place, that can be listened to by anyone, as if their author was still there. Echoes can speak about any topic and respond to any user’s purpose. They can speak about local history, art, curiosities, personal memories, and so on. Just something you think its worth to leave that may make the world a more interesting place.

As soon as I saw this tool i thought digital storytelling on a map! And that is how I am planning on using it, the children will take their journey from Google Earth (see above) and record audio of James’ escape story. The children have to navigate on a world map to the location of the first piece of audio, so giving them a real location to search will be important, and then they record part of the narrative. Whereas Google Earth placemarks are the written version, Woices is the spoken version.

This is still very much an unknown service and I am unsure how it will cope with the media we will throw at it in a very short time. I will be getting in touch with the folk at Woices to forewarn them and to get some advice about usage. Once again their is an issue around many users on one single login and with lots of media being generated.

I am planning that the children will work in pairs to create their Woices audio on the map – once the “echoes” have been created they then can choose a bunch of them to create a “walk” and this will tie in together theor work creating a seamless narrative.

Of course now thinking about it the pooled audio provides for an interesting option of generating a whole variety of “walks” by combining different children’s ideas. I also had the thought that the Google Earth journey type narrative could lead from one path to another. The starting point for one child’s story could be the end of another, the whole class has the same theme and you begin with a shared/modelled piece of work and then the children take different parts of the journey. Combining to form a whole class digital journey narrative.

There are many unanswered elements here and a completely new application to explore in the classroom, but there is also the reliability of Photostory and the exciting prospect of geo-narrative in Google Earth. I am looking forward to what the children make of it all and broadening their horizons to the nature of storytelling and narrative.

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