Notes on a workshop “Teaching “spatially” with Google Earth to Investigate Land Use Issues during NECC09.
Teacher resource page located at http://www.ei.lehigh.edu/nes/luc/
We have opened many .kml files on the above link and discussed observation and the concept of sprawl. Observing the different colors and discussing the trees, heat, freeway patterns, parking lots, etc.
Lessons should be meaningful and relavant to students.
Students are able to view various sites and ultimately make a recommendation to Walmart where they should build a new store..
When Mr. Bodzin taught this unit, they took away all the laptops at the end of the year and the teachers had to print materials for students to use instead of doing most of it on computers. Laptops should not be taken up early just to make it more convenient for the person who maintains them. It should all depend on the needs of the teachers of students.
Very interesting workshop. This is worth sharing with our Social studies teachers.
Bernie Dodge and Place Puzzles: A Design for Learning Outdoors
Criteria:
Critical Attibutes
- Resources must be studied ahead of time
- Map of related place
- Clues on map that realte the map to the resources and require both recall and ideation
Optional Attibures
- Scores kept based on speed and accuracy
- Roles to divide up the reading
- Leaderboard posted
- Clues made available one at a time based on performance
- Communication channel allowing players to collaborate in real time
The idea is to create your own Google Map to place and edit place markers with clues about a person, place or event. Students will read the clues and view the street view to help answer the clues. Wikipedia, photos and proximity can also be used to bury clues.
Students must read the links to get prior knowledge, there is a map, then the clues are reveled as the problem is solved. He uses Tiny Chat when the work is being done. Instant collaboration.
Google Forms is used to submit answers.
While this is an indoor activity, the same type of thing can be done with GPS outdoor.
Links used in presentation:
Place based Education, Promise of Place
http://promiseofplace.org
www.peecworks.org/index/ Place Base Educaiton Evaluation Collaborative
This is a concept being developed and will be available at http://placepuzzles.org to open July 21, 2009 at 3:59 PM PDT
http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2009/program/search_results_details.php?sessionid=43728863&selection_id=48088977&rownumber=5&max=22&gopage=
ISTE has updated the National Educational Technology Standards this year. The standards can be read at http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForAdministrators/2009Standards/NETS_for_Administrators_2009.htm
The headings are:
1. Visionary Leadership
2. Digital Age Learning Culture
3. Excellence in Professional Practice
4. Systemic Improvement
5. Digital Citizenship
I am participating in a discussion related to the new ISTE-A Standards
1. How do the administrator standards relate to the student and teacher standards?
Group felt that the administrators should model the use of technology for the teachers and students. They should be the visionary leader in the organization. The ones who are willing to support the use of technology in the classroom and be willing to let teachers fail and improve as they experiment with technology use.
Listening to Dr. Robert Ballard, creator of the Jason Project.
He said you often find something very interesting when you are looking for something else. I think that idea applies life.
Interesting thought. Leaders fear change because they got to leadership on the old (or current) paradigm.
He is on a mission to explore the ocean waters around the United States in a way that is similar to NASA’s exploration of space with a command center. The command center will have a production studio underwritten by National Geographic so they involve students. What incredible technology involved!
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/field/explorers/robert-ballard.html
My find for the day is…. the livescribe pen. Okay. It is early and I may find something more exciting, but even though I was less than thrilled to get up at 5:45 AM, then to sit and wait 20 minutes for the shuttle, then to walk 4 blocks to a breakfast demo of livescribe, only to be very disappointed that a Continental breakfast awaited me. I remember thinking, “I sure hope the technology I’m about to see it worth all this. It was! The livescribe pen allows the user to take pen and paper notes while recording the audio of the lesson. The pen captures everything on the paper and the audio while synchronizing them for play back. Really awesome. www.livescribe.com
Now for the keynote of the morning.
Attending a session on using audio in the classroom. This is a Bring Your Own Laptop series and we are learning about using Voki to create talking avatars and VoiceThread for uploading images to invite others to comment on it. The workshop leader’s notes are located on her website.
AC_Voki_Embed(100,133,”94b680b9bd67d69632f9315dd0a56696″,1551976, 1, “”, 0);
Get a Voki now!
Workshop notes at NECC09, Sunday, June 28, 2009
Workshop Links at
http://sites.google.com/site/cuegli/events/2009-06-28
The handout for the day:
http://www.cue.org/gwe
Difference between Google Apps and Google accounts.
Some districts can turn off feature in Google Apps that will render those apps useless. If you create a Google account with your own work email and then someone creates Google apps at that domain, your email will be sucked into the new account.
Searching Google …Even More…..Web search features
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/features.html
Enter into the search bar:
Weather:
enter “weather” and your zipcode to get the weather in that area
Calculator:
enter an equation in the search bar and receive the answer and teach order of operations. Google will guess the order it thinks you might want.
Synonym Search: add a tilde ~ in front of your search term to also search it’s synonyms
Boolean Search: Don’t do it without support
use Advanced Search to search only for PDF or PPT files.
Using Google Books and My Library
Public Domain books available online and can be entered in “My Library” to organize them.
You must put a book in your library before you can Favorite another user’s library. Cool way to share books or see what others are reading.
Google Docs
The Spreadsheet can be used as a webinar, since it has the Chat feature. It no longer automatically saves the chat and it is difficult to capture it. You will need to take screen shots or a video of the chat window.
Creating a Quiz in Google Docs
This is accomplished by creating a Form. Then use the IF formula to grade it and get statistics. =IF((j2=”answer”, 1,0). Then create a sum formula to get the grade for each student.
Google Maps
Students can see the area that will flood by using “My Maps” and changing the numbers.
Add the distance measuring tool to your maps by clicking on “My Maps” and then click on Browse the Directory and select Distance Measuring Tool.
In My Maps, students can add their own locations, icons, pictures, paths, notes on interesting sites, etc. Students can share the map and work on it collaboratively.
Google Earth
Layers… there are Educational Layers to use while zooming anywhere in the world, from NASA, Discovery Education and more.
Google Sites
Google Sites are really wikis. That makes sense and now I think I will be more interested in Google Sites. I never had a use for Google Sites before.
I’m a little disappointed in the the Google Institute, but I did learn several things about Google that did not already know.
Attending the Web 2.0 Smackdown at EduBloggerCon at NECC09, a session for anyone who wants to quickly share a Web 2.0 site.
Lists – diigo lists at http://help.diigo.com/How-To_Guide/Lists similar to Google Notebook
QR reader – app for iPhone that reads barcodes for URLs
FreshBrain – https://freshbrain.org/ Free technology learning tool
Similar Images on Google Labs for primary resources. http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/
CompFight – images http://compfight.com/ images on Flikr searched by creative commons or anyother search parameters
Flickr Storm for images – http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/ efficient searching
wibe7.tv
Coverit live for students to take collaborative notes as they watch a video or participate in event. Allows you to ustream the event inside coveritlive http://www.coveritlive.com/
Idea… us TAGS for education. Have students tag their work in a wiki with “turnin” so you can find it easily.
Fur.ly http://fur.ly/ for making tiny URLs like tinyurl 
this session being broadcast http://www.edubloggercon.com/Web+2+Smackdown+2009
twoogle…. twitter and Google on the same search page. One on the right and one on the left. http://www.twoogle.browsys.com/
Typing expansion software
retweetlist
Twitterlizer http://twitterlizer.com/
tineye reverse image search to discover where the image originated for primary resoucres http://tineye.com/
Jamstudio and Noteflight.com http://www.noteflight.com/login
firefox extension and addon – search for wolfram http://www.wolframalpha.com/
iphone app.. bump.. I have it!
Awesome impromptu session of educators sharing their favorite web 2.0 apps
Here in DC at one of the first NECC09 events… Edu BloggerCon’s meet and greet and about to start the main event. Expecting to meet many education bloggers I have read and learn more about how to use blogging in education. Stay tuned. Follow me on twitter! K20.
There are so many web sites that offer such amazing services on the Web and it is difficult to keep up with all of them One web app that I’m exploring is drop.io. It is a free, online storage application. Anyone can create a “drop,” send files to it by email, phone or a computer and share the file with others. All without creating an account. On Monday, we are going to introduce drop.io to teachers as they learn about GPS and geocaching. As teachers explore the district outdoor learning center, they will take pictures with their phones and email them to a drop.io drop boxes that we previously created. Then, as they complete the assignments, they will send voice messages to drop.io. I hope it all works, as planned. I’ll let you know! Explore drop.io at http://drop.io