THIS BLOG IS MOVING!!!!

Soon we will be moving this blog onto another domain and onto our own servers so we can enjoy all the other features and benefits of wordpress…. polls, more multimedia, podcasting, etc.

You can get a preview of the work in progress and update your blogrolls and feeds at: http://blog.prometheanplanet.com

Google Earth and Google Maps; Ultimate education resources?

Google Earth continues to expand in power and usefulness and is awesome on the Activboard.

The latest version is now supported by an increasing number of immensely useful features, many organised under a section called “Geographic Web” – when photographs and wikipedia articles relating to the places you are flying over can be accessed with a simple click. Special links to video clips from sources such as the National Geographic or Discovery mean that the experience is completely multimedia.

Many 3rd party “layers” can also be downloaded – and these can overlay Google Earth with live weather information. historical features or create virtual tours charting the life and travels of famous individuals.

If you have Google Earth installed. here is a great example – a tour of the ancient sites of Rome.

Another impressive feature of the web based Google Maps is ‘Street View’ – once you find a city (currently US) – you can transform into a pedestrian and enter a virtual world where you can travel along streets in a fully photographic way. With full image panning and zooming – it is true virtual reality…. walk along the streets of New York to visit Times Square or any of the many historic places – and shift between, map, image and street views to fully reinforce the understanding of maps. Awesome! Why not visit Disney!

On my one visit to San Francisco the Golden Gate Bridge was shrouded in thick mist – now I can see what I missed!

Are these tools the new ‘digital atlases’ that children need to be using in the age of GPS and anytime, anywhere connectivity?

Google Docs – Live Document Collaboration on your Activboard

This neat video (a lesson idea in itself) highlights how the latest Google docs application offer a way for students in a classroom with net access and an e-mail address can collaboratively create a document on the Activboard.

After the lesson – the students can continue the activity, perhaps collaborating with each other at home (the Google Docs has a secure chat room built in) to construct a presentation for when they next get together as a group.

Activboard Tips on iTunes….

Want to have a neat way of getting ideas for using the Activboard! Get the tips and tricks as a podcast!

If you have iTunes installed – you can simply click this link and it will open and go straight to right place!

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=260527899

Google Earth looks skyward!

Google Earth needs renaming…to Google Galaxy.. The latest version lets you view the sky above as well…

Search for constellations and stars, animate the orbit of the planets – or if you are feeling ambitious – perhaps simulate how early navigators used stars to cross the oceans!

For those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere a visit ‘down under’ can be surprising – I remember my first night camping at Mount Cook on the Southern Island of New Zealand – and waking up before dawn to an amazing starfield I simply had never seen before… It was like I had stepped onto an alien planet – no familar ‘plough’ pointing the way north!

Take it from me – you ain’t seen the milky way if you have not seen it from there!

Now I can relive the experience on my Activboard!

EDAs and ‘Beaming’ files in class… blending personalised and group learning

I have been having a great few weeks since my last post…

We have immersed ourselves in the ‘mobile learning’ agenda over the Summer break – and armed with two Fujitsu-Siemens EDAs, and a mobile phone with a camera we set out to see what approaches and ideas we could discover that we could apply with the Activboard for when term time came round.

In a previous post we had been discovering ideas for student phones.. but these EDAs really take it to a different level.Some of things we have been doing…

• Setting a series of tasks to do ‘in the field’ – the kids tick ‘em off as they complete them (they loved this and have not tired of it yet!) – and it beats a clipboard and soggy, ripped photocopy sheet anytime in the coolness stakes.
• Interviewing people (audio or video).. default 30 second time limits really focussed the conversation
• Photographing specific things in ‘photo scavenger hunts’,
• Drawing maps and diagrams of ‘real things’!,
• Setting waypoints and points of interest using GPS then estimating and working out distances between places,
• If we were near home or a WiFi hotspot – getting online to use Google maps or to answer questions as they arise… (we now know that Quinine comes from the bark of a tree – courtesy of Wikipedia – as we sat in a restaurant pondering what was it in tonic water that apparently had something to do with preventing malaria and my son says – why not find out now!)

All I would add though – is that the device itself does not magically make them start thinking of things to do with it… It was clear that without guidance and set tasks – kids see little use other than playing ‘Bubble Breaker’… The role of the teacher is most definitely safe! But what was surprising though was how often they were the ones who prompted us when we should use it to solve problems and questions as they arose as we travelled around…. ‘Why not use Google maps’ (when I got lost in the car), ‘why not go online’ – when we were intrigued by a rather bright and colourful caterpillar we found (apparently it was a tussock moth) – The kids were thinking ‘mobile connectivity’ as the norm – I was still having to remind myself!

So back to the Activboard – armed with a memory card full of stuff!

Wow… Bluetooth rocks… if used appropriately!

I have used a Bluetooth slate in the past and was pretty unimpressed with the performance in the classroom - it would suddenly decide to stop working or would have seconds where it would just go really sloooooowwwwww – but clearly the real benefit with Bluetooth is quickly and easily transferring files between devices. Pairing the EDAs to the laptop connected to the activboard was effortless.. and a simple click would see a file beaming its way to the screen.

What really made this so great was sending the incoming files straight to the Promethean Collections folders… When an incoming beam was detected – you are prompted to choose a location – just choose the Documents > Promethean > Activstudio3 > Shared Collections – and everything beamed to the PC can be found in the AS resource library for instant use in flipcharts – neat! The pocket painter app was particularly powerful – kids can create their own drawings, images, concept maps, etc. and simply beam them to the board as images… ready to drag and drop into the lesson.

Of course – with the Activboard working with devices that allows kids to contribute content – a whole new pedagogy is revealed… by beaming work to the board – THEIR work becomes the focus of discussion, group tasks such as making a flipchart magazine become easy – EDAs can get all the image and text work done independently and a few minutes beaming files – and you can organise all the content in a flipchart!

All those Export options in Activstudio suddently come into their own too… save the flipcharts as a powerpoint or PDF and you can view it in alls its glory on the EDA.. Go to Google Maps and focus on an area for a fieldtrip.. annotate a path on it using the activpen in desktop mode and save the combined page as an image – beam it – and on the EDA the kids have a simple map to follow!

The future is not personalised learning, with no class or group work – it has to be a clever blend of these amazing technologies!

Open University – LearningSpace… HE on demand!

Fancy a brush up on your teacher training?  Open University might have the ideal solution.
There are 31 units under Education alone covering everything from teaching ideas (visualisation in Maths example) to working with colleagues. Broken down into short chunks – they are an ideal way of catching up with new (or old) ideas and being online it is truly anytime, anywhere learning.

If you are subject teaching – then complete HE courses on Science, Art, Technology, etc. can be browsed. I am a trained Primary teacher but I could actually see myself using some of the introductory materials used in classteaching or to refresh my subject knowledge – being well written, clear and supported with good questions and media. Virtually all of the material is licensed under a Creative Commons Share alike license for England in Wales – so you can also reuse it or adapt it quite freely within flipcharts for your Activboard as long as you make the appropriate references and don’t try to sell it.

Open University are not alone in making their courses ‘open to all’. The renowned MIT are offering similar – so if you need to catch up on your quantum physics or global economics – then you do not have to take a four year career break.

MIT are clear in their mission: “A key MIT OCW audience is educators, and for them, we are hoping that by providing the syllabus, reading lists and lecture notes, we are offering a chance for them to jumpstart their own pedagogy and improve the way they teach their chosen discipline.”

Links:

• Open University Learning Space
• MIT OpenCourseWare

Museums go virtual…

 The Exploratorium – a popular museum with a renowned web presence, is moving into the world of Second Life. Forget old fashioned web pages and images banks of artefacts  – this is how kids will explore museums in the future and you can try it out now!

This article about the project says….

“Brick-and-mortar interactive science centers offer fun and educational experiences for visitors of every age. But in a virtual world, many of the constraints of the real world can be overcome, offering experiences that transcend reality. Exploratorium staff members have created just such a space in the massively multi-user, three-dimensional world of Second Life. In the virtual museum called the ‘Splo, we’ve been experimenting with the social, contextual, and educational possibilities of a world in which people can fly through the solar system, scan their own bodies, and change gravity so they can bounce off walls.  In mixed-reality events which combine live media programs with the virtual world, visitors can watch a solar eclipse while sitting next to someone on the other side of the earth.

If you have Second Life installed you can get to the virtual exhibits from the links on their website.

What does this potentially mean for educators and the creation of digital learning resources for classteaching?

As teachers we can sometimes think it is quite cool and sufficient that we can cut and paste an image into a document or browse a website and make a presentation from the things we cut and paste or download …. We have done that for a few years – it works, it is simply what we do… a habit.

But why just ‘present’ when you can actively enter a Virtual Museum and interact directly with the exhibits. A web page or Powerpoint type representation will never match that level of involvement!

If you have an Activboard you can control Second Life all from the Pen – activating the Head Up Display (HUD) provides on screen buttons to move around (no more using the keyboard!) and the Activpen Right Click button and hover functions offer all the function of a mouse necessary to operate the virtual objects.

Mobile Phones – multimedia power in every student’s hand!

I got a new Nokia mobile phone recently – nothing fancy – just a standard model. After years of owning one I had simply got in the habit of thinking that its only pupose was for making calls and the very occasional text message (communication for people who do not really want to talk to someone!) and that all the rest was ‘fancy extras’ that were bundled in with no real thought or design other than make me pay more!

After actually reading the manual… I was amazed to find in my hand a device that can capture high quality images at a perfectly reasonable and instantly usable 1-Megapixel resolution, a video recorder and a sound recorder that ALL save in formats that can embed straight into an Activprimary or Activstudio software. JPEGS, WAV and AVI…

Then to discover that the in-built Bluetooth capability meant that I could transfer the files to the computer connected to the Activboard for NOTHING!!!!! – well – my mind was spinning!

Virtually all the ‘digital natives‘ we teach are surgically attached to their mobiles – yet we are bent on banning them in schools. Perhaps if teachers respected the kids mastery of their devices and showed that there were more creative uses of a video recorder than ‘happy slapping‘ then we can perhaps help bridge the divide between modern educators and modern learners who are all challenged in their own way with keeping on top of new and emerging technology.

Getting going:

1. Set up a bluetooth connection between the phone and the PC or MAC… This was effortless on my MAC. Just switch on Bluetooth on the Phone and MAC and ask the MAc to find the device. That was it.
2. Take your pictures and videos then choose ‘Send’ (that is what the Nokia says) then choose ‘Via Bluetooth’ – a pop up appears on the MAC to let you accept the file – and moments later it is in the documents folder ready for use on the Activboard. Amazing!

I now have at my disposal:

• a Star Trek tricorder device that I can use for a Science Fiction themed lesson…
• a personal multimedia contribution system for the Activclassroom – ‘you have all got to do a 10 second ‘TV news style’ video report on a topical issue of your choice and Bluetooth it to the Activboard…’
• a data recording tool we can take out into the field to engage every child in capturing digital images, audio and video to use in their own flipcharts

First stop though – revisit the rule about mobiles not being allowed in school!

Google ‘my maps’

Most people will have some idea of how great Google Maps and Google Earth are on an Activboard… You can zoom around the world with a simple touch or slide of the pen. Whether searching for secret military bases in the deserts of America [here] for a creative writing exercise or for indications of deforestation in the Amazon rainfoest [here]- the board really brings the content to life.

What is new from Google is just how easy it is to create customised maps that let you add you own infomation and images/links at any location on the planet.

Go to http://maps.google.com and try out the ‘My Maps’ options. Once you have signed in (you need a free Google account) you can start adding your own points and information on a map.

Here is a great example – The Earth as Art – using Google maps and Images from Space

When you have finished you can save the link to embed in a Flipchart so you can use it as a teaching resource again and again or share it online. You can even download it as a KML file to open in Google Earth.

Some of the things myself and my wife are planning to use this for in class:

• “Roman Cumbria” – Exploring key sites and using the lines and shape tools of Google maps to overlay old borders or roads leading to places such as in this example tour of Vindolanda
• “Geography visual glossary” – Find examples of key natural features around the world – glaciers, ox-bow lakes, hanging valleys, etc.
• “Invaders” – charting the story of a young Viking’s first raiding mission across the North sea.. using the locations to drive the narrative

There are number of important 21st century skills to develop and explore with students – making sense of map directions on web sites, looking for visual or physical evidence from digital sources and making informed inferences from data. Overall the map element helps make the abstract concrete for students.

From an Activ software skills perspective – you can use the ‘camera tool’ to clip bits from Google maps directly into a flipchart for discussion and notetaking.