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

Teachertube – ideas for using your Activclassroom

TeacherTube is just like the popular video site YouTube but the content is meant for teachers and students.

Check this out – loads of free lesson ideas in quick to digest 30-45 second clips!

Activprimary:
http://www.teachertube.com/gvideos.php?gid=460

Activstudio:
http://www.teachertube.com/gvideos.php?gid=500

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?

Interesting use of Activboard, Activslate and Activote in HE Art and Design

Leeds College or Art and Design (where Damian Hirst first threw a dead sheep off the roof in the name of Art!) has taken on Activclassroom technology and found a range of very interesting ways of using it in a HE context.

Already a leader in innovative use of learning technology – the college have their own Private Second Life learning island – they have innovated in their deployment of the Promethean technology and looked at how the technologies can work together. They have even developed a “Virtual Activboard” and response system that has proven immensely popular among the many educational institutions using Second Life as a collaborative Learning Environment.

A key idea has been in making the Activboard part of the student’s “creative toolkit” – providing focus groups and teams with a “shared digital surface” to brainstorm ideas on to storyboard ideas. Critiques and peer review of student work – a key element of the learning process – is greatly enhanced with Activboard’s 96″ Widescreen display and great use is made of the screen recorder and annotation tools to capture feedback from the group and lecturers live and make them available online for on iPods for student review minutes later.

Much of their work is blogged online and  there is a great example of an Activboard being used to control an immersive 3D environment using the pen and students describing the design decisions they made at the DDM Collective blog.

Annabeth Robinson at LCAD highlights the value of “authentic feedback” – She says; “The screen recorder makes for a clear capture of the whole critique – everything from the voices, demonstrations and questions is captured so that students have a far richer report on which to base their responses. A paper critique is open for subsequent interpretation and misinterpretation. Capturing the group discussing the work live, digitally is a massive benefit for learners.”

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.