Where's Gromit (Geotagging a trail and playing with Google Maps)?

As part of the Wallace and Gromit Grand Appeal for Bristol Children's Hospital, Gromit has been Unleashed upon the City and surrounding area in various guises.  Our mission should we choose to accept.... to track him down and.... well.... admire him.....

On the trail we have met scores of people young and old, using without thought a host of mobile technologies and tools, iPads, Tablets, digital cameras.  Personally I have been using a Smart phone, snapping a couple of images and then adding these to a simple photo blog as well as sharing these with Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers .

A while back I began using Quikmaps to geotag images to their locations, Not all of the characters on this trail are as easy to find as they appear on the official trail map,  so in addition to the official map and app here is a link to my "Google Map," where I have begun to add place holders showing the location of and one image for each Gromit Sculpture I have found.  This has promoted a great deal of discussion at home as Google's satellite imagery has not been updated for the area for quite some time, new buildings have gone up and in some parts of the city the landscape has changed beyond recognition.  It has been a challenge identifying some locations but I have really enjoyed the process as well as reminding myself of some of the fun that can be had revisiting and reusing a familiar tool.   

Bristol Past and Present

Have just discovered this fabulous web based resource " The Changing Face of Bristol England and It's People."

This image from the site and acredited to Paul Townsend, is part of a vast collection of images both on the site and in the Site's Google Earth Geotagged Set. However watch carefully because there is more to it than meets the eye, once on the site follow the Bristol Then and Now link for further examples.

I like the idea of Geotagging Historical images, it gives them a presence and point of reference in the here and now. Perhaps even more powerful for me in this site though is the use of image swapping through animation, allowing direct visual comparison between street scenes in the past and images captured at the same location more recently.

I have pondered a number of times on how cool it would be, to enable use of old photographs with students in this way, using digital cameras to frame shots as they engaged in a kind of historical orienteering activity, collecting images on trails perhaps before using other digital tools to morph between one their modern image and the old photo they had been given as a reference point.

In our modern cityscapes, with potential access to mobile technologies and GPS this strikes me as an increasingly practical possibility. Paul's site provides some interesting models to use and share when I next set out to explore this with colleagues.

It also represents a fantastic visual history resource for the people of Bristol. Thank you.

Historyman's geotagged collection of Memories of Bristol, can be found on Panoramio.

Adendum Pictorial tours of the city from About Bristol

Active Mapping and 2Create: An Example Outcome

I've posted a number of times in the past about 2 simple's 2 create a story, and how I have used "export as flash," to create web publishable interactive texts with students. 2 create has been the tool of choice this term, and it too has an "export" or "save as flash" file option. The big difference between the two tools as you will see from the example below, a sneak peak from our mapping project is the ability to develop your own navigation paths, by inserting buttons and hyperlinks.

By exporting as flash the 2 create project is also useable as a portable/standalone presentation, that can be run not only in web pages like the one below, but can also be inserted and played in a Smartboard Notebook, as part of a presentation. So as part of a teacher resource development tool box it is also apotentially powerful tool, that could be used to develop layered texts, similar to those developed for the National Literacy Strategy's IWB Packages using PowerPoint, and the flash based multimodal stories presented by the Hamilton Trust.

The flash file below, exported from 2 create has been uploaded to our school server, using the portable apps version of Filezilla I downloaded last weekend, and then embedded here using a piece of code I found on Flash For Blogger-dummies Guide.




Now I know that this works, I can spend some time with the students next week using this tool to show how their completed files get onto the web on the IWB, before using the embed flash tool with small groups on our class wordpress blog to share their maps as they are finished. A big well done to T and P, who developed this file. What I was particularly impressed about with this example, is how the two students themselves decided to label the buttons. This they said was to help their visitors understand how the map worked and where they would go on their journey. I hope this illustrates the kind of learning outcomes that were achieved and presented in my previous post. Top job Year 3.

Image and File Credits: Maps. worldatlas.com Photographs and Slide Show: Y3 Teyfant Community School

Video, Hyperlinking and Quikmaps!

Having spent a good part of last week playing with Quikmaps, and getting really excited by the possibilities that attaching photographs to place marks provided, I have been pondering on a comment left by Tom, around tagging other media to place marks, and how this might be used with my class. As he suggested, If we can use html tags to embed images from the web to place marks, can we use similar methods to embed other media types, and have them play inside the place mark too? This left me however with additional questions, what if this were not possible, how could we then provide a link to these resources, so they could be used, either as part of a presentation or as part of a data logging or "collect store and share," process. I am concerned that tools such as this do not get used simply because we can, but that the tools we choose to use should match the context of their use and support the generation and development of meaningful and purposeful outcomes. As I began to think my way round this I was also reminded of the E Safety issues we must consider when preparing and developing material for a project such as this. Because of the use of geolocation technologies, we need to ensure that we evaluate material with students to minimise personal reference and risks to identification. These are however considerations that we should all bear in mind as good practice when developing digital content with and for students, as central to their E Safety Education. In preparing digital media work, and reviewing material for publication, we need to bear in mind our school's e safety and digital permissions guidelines.

So this was my starting point. How could and why should I use video with quikmaps? What tools might I use to develop the video in the first place? What purpose might developing this resource or asset have? The notion of asset or resource development is I think a key one in how we view this tool and its role in the teaching and learning process. So where to go!

Contextualising this Asset

Our School is undergoing enormous changes at the moment with the development and construction of a new through campus, of which we will become part. In less than a year the school we now attend will be gone, and the landscape which the students are so familiar changed completely. A great context then for using video assets with students linked to Quikmaps might be to create a living History Archive.

Tools for the job!

I have used MS PhotoStory and Movie Maker a number of times with students at school to present and edit digital work, and with my class early in the year as part of a vodcast experiment. I have been really impressed with how quickly they are able compile and create projects from scratch with this tool, adding sound as a musical background or through direct recording of voiceovers for individual images. In contextualising this idea I am revisiting an idea from an earlier post regarding little patches of ground. As I said above the footprint our school currently leaves in its landscape is about to become a memory or shadow with the development of the new school campus, and its demolition, but this is a place has been a large part of our student's and community's lives for the past 50 years, so how do we preserve the legacy, while moving on?

Using PhotoStory to create a video

Using digital cameras the students might be asked to identify a place or memory from within the school grounds or locality that is special to them, that they would like to preserve or to change, and to capture 2 or 3 images which sum up the essence of their connection to that place, or sum up their reasons for choosing it. Returning to class they would import their images to Photostory, and begin drafting and or rehearsing their script, recording voiceovers to support their "voicethread." On completion the photostory would be exported to video, for upload to a web host.

Uploading Video to the Web

At the moment Quikmaps does not support independently hosted video, and my LA like most does not allow "YouTube" files through the firewall, for the time being anyway, they do seem to allow "Google Video" so for the sake of this project, I will upload my student video clips to "google video" marking them as unlisted educational files.

Once the videos are uploaded to Google, clicking on the file hyperlink takes me to a page where I can view the video file in its new google video format.

• To the right of this screen is a link button to "email-embed html,"
  
• Pressing this button offers the chance to get the "embed code" for the video file.
  
• Click the "embed html" hyperlink to retrieve the code
  
• Highlight and copy it.

Adding The Video Clip to a Quikmap Place Marker

I need to create my map as outlined in Imaging our Learning Journey and add our place markers. Once this has been done:

• I Click on the pin I wish to associate my video clip with
  
• Add a heading text or annotation for the clip.
  
• Copy my "embed code" from Google Video
  
• Return to my quikmaps window or tab
• Right click in the place mark bubble and paste the embed code
  
• Repeat this for each pin, and then save the map.
  

Viewing my Map with Video

Returning to the My Maps page, I can press the view larger image hyperlink, perhaps expanding the view to full screen.

Clicking on the placemarker pins, now not only opens a bubble, but one which contains a "Google Video" player, where I can watch the clip, attached to the context where it was shot, or with which it has an affiliation. (See the image at the beginning of this post)

This "Mashup" can now also be embedded itself into a blog, a website, or maybe even a wiki, by copying and pasting the code given in the "this map in my website" link.

Adding Hyperlinks

In addition to video from Google, embedding images from the web as described here, hyperlinks can also be added to place markers using html. So even if the resource or asset cannot be embedded in the place marker directly, then readers can be redirected to it. Inserting the following piece of code to a place marker where

• Red = the tags embed the hyperlink
  
• Blue text should be substituted with the web address/url/location of the resource on the web
  
• Black text should be substituted to create the text in the placemark that describes the place being linked to.

Appologies for the blurriness and pixcelation in this image, will try to fix it later... The tag in place should look something like this.

Linking in this way makes reference to a place on the web, where content you cannot associate directly with the place marker can be found, eg a podcast, a website, or a wiki age/project. If associated with a media file, this would also enable direct download perhaps to the browser, to be saved to the user's computer, or with permission from the user, enable it to be opened in an appropriate application, eg a sound or video file in Media Player. If you wanted to use a file saved to an independent host site then this would be a possible solution to achieving this without using Google.

Born to Ponder

I wonder how many similar contexts for this asset could be conjured up. Some that stand out at the moment are

Recording, logging and tagging a field trip,

Logging experiences on a school journey. A Geoblog!?*

Thinking of Joe Dale and the use of digital media to support MFL, I was wondering whether there might be opportunities to use this tool to support development of MFL assets. Maybe drawing on the student's locality and experiences, to log familiar locations with images and adding/developing commentary in languages as well as English, to develop virtual tour guides, and tools for younger students.

Its A Small Old World...

An amazing thing happened today, I recieved a comment from Paul Klintworth sharing how he had used ideas from Imaging our Learning Journey to present a journey around his school with a group of children in Vancouver. Visiting their blog today was a fantastic experience. I really liked the way he had adapted the process using colour coded flags to mark the different viewpoints, green to look in towards the school and red to look out onto the landscape surrounding them.

I was reminded on my visit of how, when I first began teaching in Bristol, we used to use photographic trails around historical sites, one that particularly stood out was a trail in the city docks, where students would use photographs to help in an orienteering activity. As I was watching the Photostory made by the students at Paul's school on a visit to Yew Lake, I began thinking again about how interesting it would be to combine media and to use quikmaps as part of a multimodal resource or presentation set, to help students explore and share their viewpoints around their "place in space."

I have been playing over the last couple of days again with Quikmaps, and discovered that video clips uploaded to Google Video can be embedded to play in their player within the place mark bubbles. I have been drawn to the idea of developing a "little patches of ground project" with students for sometime. This afternoon I have been pondering on the possibility of combining the use of photostories with Quikmaps to help develop and embed this idea in a geographical context. Perhaps using MS Photostory to present/create short audio visual clips about places and student thoughts about them, uploading these to the web and then tagging them in quickmaps as student "voice" threads to the locations they relate to.

There are obvious e saftey considerations here, in that places would need to be non specific to particular students personal space in the world, and be impersonal in that they would not feature images of the students themselves. However, in relation to the campus developments at our school currently, it would be an intersting exercise to engage the children in before the landscape they are used to disappears completely. As a Wiki based project this might also be an intersting idea to consider developing with other schools, or maybe other classes within school.

Returning to the small world alluded to in the title, the most amazing thing today was discovering, while seeking permission to share Paul's work, that Bristol, and particularly the area I work is common ground to us both. Albeit a while ago, it seems Paul spent time working with colleagues at my school, as well as teaching in at least one other where I spent time on secondment. Great to hear from you. Thanks to you and your students for sharing your work. Hope to hear again from you soon. :o)

Imaging our Learning Journey: Learning to attach images to a Quikmap!

For a while now I have looked in awe at Quikmaps developed by colleagues, where photographs have been associated to placemarks, wondering how this was achieved. I shared my most recent post through twitter and Tom Barrett came to the rescue. I hadn't realised that the use of html tags in the place mark bubbles, would load images stored elsewhere on the web. This has opened a whole new world of possibility for me, and presented yet another tool to use in data logging and monitoring with my students.

In class a couple of weeks back, my Y3 students mapped a "landscape walk" locating images collected by "tagging" them on a table top map. This map used an aerial photograph I had previously made and then screen captured from quickmaps. To capture the map, for use in the classroom, I used the "printscreen" button on the keyboard, copying the screen image to the computer's clipboard, and then pasting the map to a graphics package where it was cropped and resized, before printing out for use in their table top task. The outcome of the activity, mediated by small group discussion, was to create a poster/map, where the route for our walk and staging points on our journey were marked, with labels and arrows placed to show the locations where our photographs had been taken.

This activity was in part inspired by tagged mapping activities I had spotted in the blogosphere, through the work of John Johnston and Anthony Evans, and show how, even without the "tech know how" it is possible in looking beyond the technology, to develop similar processes for use in the classroom. Thanks to input and encouragement by Tom and his blog, I have decided to have a go at transferring the table top task into the Web 2.0 world, and the remainder of this post is me thinking through how how I did this and how I might develop the activities worked on with my students.

In his post Adding Image and Videos to Quikmaps Tom Barrett explains the "how" process, of associating images with placemarks in Quikmaps, but before this can be done any images you wish to use must be collected and uploaded to a web space or host. A number of free sites enable this, among which are Flickr and Picasa. We have a school website, and each year group has it's own community and gallery spaces, where images and files can be stored, so it is here for my first go I have uploaded the images I intend to use in making my map.

Making The Map


I created a quikmaps account a while back to play with, and for my previous post I had a prepared map. Having logged in and loaded this map the screen shot above shows this and the interface for the Quikmaps environment.

To create my map from scratch

• I used the search tool to navigate to the approximate location I wanted to create a map for.
• Using the zoom tools I refined my location,
• I centred my map by using the hand grab tool to move it until the location I wanted appeared in the middle of my map window.

With the map in the window, the tools above the map were used to draw, "doodle," on it, enabling me to mark and trace the route of our walk. Within the map window itself there are also tools to change the map type or view. The map can be viewed as a map, aerial photograph or hybrid, and to the left are a collection of zoom and navigation buttons.

In the space to the right of the map, are the place mark pins. These are added to locations on the map,

• By picking them up with the hand grab tool
• dragging them to the place you want them on the map
• Dropping them in place.
• Once on the map they can be picked up again to refine our location
  

Once on the map, clicking the pin head, opens a bubble, that includes a text window, where information about the location can be included. This up until now has been the limit to Quikmaps I have created with students. Simple text based tags, helping to describe places they have visited, or recording their comments.

John Johnston has extended this to map wildlife images, captured on walks, while Tom has used historical images with students to develop inferential activities around locations as they appeared in the past. Anthony used his quikmap to locate photographs of images he had taken of BeeBots, as he explored the ideas around a where in the world is... type project.

Here you can see an Information Bubble from my Quikmap, with the opening section of code, suggested in Tom's guide to embed a photograph.

On my map you can see that I included the route we took, using the line drawing tool, as well as the pins for each staging point on the way.



Preparing my Images

Having created my map, I now need to prepare my images. I don't want to use vast pickies, in any of my pages, as big images mean particularly on a page with multiple images slower download speeds. A while back I decided that I would use standard sized smaller graphics on my pages, in school and at home. In sessions with students and colleagues I also taught them how and why this was necessary, and have downloaded the MS Powertool "image resizer," a simple to use batch conversion tool, installing this on the school network to help me and the students with this process.

Once installed, using this Windows XP extension, is really straightforward.

• Copy all of the images you wish to use to a folder
• Select the images you want to resize
• Right click to open the file context menu
• From the menu click resize pictures
• In the dialogue box that appears select the image size you require.

For my web graphics I usually opt for the "Win CE" option. Since I am going to upload these to my school web space and I may decide to put multiple images in a bubble this is the size I will use today.

I author, edit and publish our school website using MS Frontpage, so I guess the next step is to copy my resized images to the gallery folder of the website and upload them... Working with the students at school, I could also open the site as a web folder, log in and then copy the images to the site.

Using Flikr or Picassa this is the point at which I would log onto the site and upload my images to a gallery here.

In for a Penny In For A Pound

Ok I have my images uploaded to my webspace, I have made my map, now for the moment of truth. Adding the image source tag to the bubble the web address (url) of the image, then closing the tag... Yay! it works!


Now I will select the tag code by clicking and dragging

• right click the code
• Select copy from the menu
• Open the new placemarker bubble
• right click and paste this tag,
• and edit the image file name (.jpg) to enable the code to locate these new images.

Adding A quikmaps widget to the blog

Now I have finished my map, tested it and know that it works, I have decided to include it in my blog using a widget from widget box. Having ssaved my map, and then selected to add "this map in your site"
I clicked the add widget button
clicked the embed source code button
clicked the copy code to clipboard button

and in blogger, pasted the code to the page here in html view.



This process has been a really exciting development for me, a new tool to add to my Humanities and Data Logging toolbox, and to develop for use with Tizz our traveling bear.

However for anyone, who like myself, is also thinking about mobile technologies right now, this seems to me to be one further exemplification of a context where the "collect, store and share" affordance of these tools, discussed in previous posts, would be really useful. Students on a school visits, capturing images, making notes, perhaps even recording sounds or short video clips that on return to school, could be tagged and linked to create quikmaps of the locations they have visited. Even more powerful would be the addition of the resources being captured in real time. Use of 3g tools and moblogging in the field; using prepared maps of visit locations and place markers or GPS, students could potentially use prepared maps, and add resources, tag locations as they work, making this resource an additional tool in the "collect, store and share" process.

Back on the ground for a moment, and back with my own students, this tool will be extremely helpful in consolidating their understanding of spatial relationships. particularly their place in space, as we are able to dynamically zoom in and out of the locality they live.

My next step, is to use this tool with them to explore food journeys. Next term I want to use a visit a local Supermarket, to look at the journey of some of their favourite foods, or their five a day. Using a walk around the supermarket as a starting point to identify where in the world their food comes from, it will be interesting to tag these locations on a quikmap, and to begin not only considering where they are grown, but how they get to us. In terms of the National Curriculum for Geography the tool will take on two roles

1) as a data logger, the site and map created will facilitate the storage of data, and marking of the relative locations of each source to our home locality.
2) As a dynamic environment, we will also be able to begin considering the wider connections between ourselves and other locations.

It might be interesting for the students to begin linking our web based resources to the personal atlases they have been making, and in terms of Geographical concepts already developed in the process, to discuss with them and other colleagues how this "dynamic personal mapping" type approach, might be developed to create an ongoing resource, that students can develop and expand as they move through school. But this will no doubt be another story.

Note to self: Consider with colleagues how this tool might be used to modify and innovate QCA Geography Units

Geotagging a Learning Journey

On Wednesday afternoon we went for a walk around the school environment with the aim of exploring and capturing digitally features of the existing and currently changing landscape around the site. In previous posts, I have mentioned other projects involving creative partnerships, where students are logging these changes over time by digital means, as the new all through school rises in the space behind our current school building. During discussion with my class the other day, it slowly became apparent just how few of the students had actually noticed some of the more prominent features of the locality they pass everyday. It struck me as interesting how easy it is to assume and take for granted the knowledge and experiences our young cares bring to school of their locality and their place in it.

A couple of questions I have always found interesting to ask students when looking at a landscape painting are "where they think the artist was when they made the image?" and "what do they think might have been behind them, to the left, the right or above the canvas?" I pondered the other day how much I enjoyed sitting on the top deck of a bus, with the chance to see familiar settings from a different perspective, and from this came the idea for a digital landscape walk, using digital photographs to enable students to capture different views from the same location, that we could then use to focus discussion back in the classroom in relation to a map of the journey.



This map created using quikmaps, shows an aerial photograph of the route we followed with the students. Each of the small map pins, showing a staging point on the journey. The students used digital blue cameras at each staging point to capture two images, one looking out from the school into the surrounding landscape, and another after a 180 degree turn that captured the scene looking back towards the school grounds. Back in class the students were encouraged to review their images, identifying and locating on a shared map where each image had been captured, before matching the two opposing landscape perspectives, to locations on the map. To follow up, and as a table top activity, small groups of students were given copies of a blank map and challenged to mark the route they had followed, locate the staging points for themselves before finally mapping their images to their locations.

The students are currently using 2 Simple's 2create, to to develop their own interactive atlases. These are very much in the developmental stage. We have used maps downloaded from World Atlas.com, to create slides that begin with the world and which will progressively zoom down onto the place where we live and work, using hyperlinked buttons to enable this. I am now thinking how interesting it would be to extend the project, by encouraging the students to think about how this tool could be used to to create a textured presentation about our school in its landscape, maybe in a virtual tour type format. Using 2Create, means that the final projects can be exported in flash format for publication to the web, or on the year group blog, providing audience and purpose for the outcomes.

Post Script:

YAY! Thanks to Tom Barrett and Twitter I have now also learned how to add some of the images that the students captured to our quikmap. This is really exciting...

Geotagging with Lucy

Just talking through, sharing and bandying some ideas with a colleague about how we might use Quikmaps to support our geography project next term. How to organise use of this tool with the whole class has been flagged as a potential issue, but by planning in and developing table top tasks as research activities allowing data collection before creating class or group maps as a final or ongoing outcome, should help with this. Look forward to writing about and sharing these later.

Google For Schools

Received an envelope full of glossy goodies from Google this morning, introducing Google For UK Schools. The space includes some interesting project ideas starting points and support materials for using Google Earth and Google Maps involving geotagging as well as search tutorials for students, and presenting some gadgets that may be of particular interest to teachers. I like the idea of the "Fair Trade and Chocolate" project, which seems to me to have some interesting possibilities for using geotagging to help students understand the origins of the foods they eat.

Next term we will be engaging with a geography based topic where we will be trying to integrate work on food and eating. This has set me thinking about how it might be interesting to adapt this to think about the journey of a meal. Perhaps beginning with food labels researching the origins of the ingredients, or even making a visit to the local supermarket, to photograph and note where the fruits and vegetables in our local five a day come from. The countries of origin could be geotagged by students using my quikmaps account, or following table top tasks as part of a shared session, for inclusion in our class blog or year group community pages. Maybe we could add these to our growing interactive school atlas, and be embedded in Tizz's Travels. Well some "food" for thought anyway. There are some interesting possibilities for this idea, and I am sure this would make an interesting starting point, not only for supporting understanding of our "place in space," but could be extended with older students around issues of global responsibility, sustainability and fair trade.

Units of Measure: Might quikmaps help visualise big units in the locality?

This week we have been thinking about the relationships between units of measures, presenting an image of a cm and a m is fine, but how do you present a picture of 1km to a group of 7 year olds? I was pondering this evening on how useful quikmaps might be for this, estimating and plotting out the distance in the locality. Driving into school this morning I used the odometer in my car to help me rough out a kilometre so I could share it with my class, and this evening have set up a blog to use as a modelling tumble. What do you think, this map features a prominent landmark and an imaginary walk which is approx 1km long?

Its a Classroom Swing Thing

Its been a hectic start to the term, but very exciting too. Have spent most of the last 8 days trying to get back into the swing of what it means to be a full time class teacher again, but it has been great to be able to start putting into practice and to begin establishing the routines and small changes that I have wanted to engage colleagues with over the past 12 months.

The impact of a years specialist teaching is also beginning to show through student's holding of basic skills within this years, year 2 to year 6. Evidenced in the excitement to share today the work which some year 4 students had been doing using 2 create while beginning to make Victorian Websites. After a week back at school the basic hyperlink structures were in place on three slides, and some simple content had been included on the site that was shared. The work that year 6 have been doing this week using Fronter was also a talking point, as they are beginning to recognise and transfer skills acquired through making navigable slideshows in PowerPoint, and their engagement with think.com to develp and share new content. Our year 3 classes were also quickly into the groove, when the use of Espresso and the internet, was included in a class based carousel task, independently logging on, locating and working with the material they were asked to explore and use, the only problem they encountered being a network set up issue, that currently disables activex components, but this was quickly over come. In the online classroom too consolidated routines from last year made the session run smoothly, students navigating the local network, locating template files, saving them as and beginning to edit and reformat the text presented. Last year at this time the same activity took two weeks to develop, and reflects the significant progress that has been made in the last 12 months the ICT capability of our students.

Moving beyond the classroom, I have begun to establish content on our year group community pages, and to set up frames for future work. I spent an evening with two colleagues exploring Podium on Monday, and this has lead us to initially set up an account for Y3 with podomatic, until we can resolve firewall issues and ftp, and the potential in through one of our amazing LSAs to develop small projects with Y5. Our students are also set up to write entries to the year group blog every Friday afternoon initially, and were very excited at having recieved comments about their work over last weekend. Thanks to Anthony, for his inspirations around geotagging earlier in the year, as I was further inspired to include a quikmap as a talking point, to begin tagging comments on a world map, so the students could get some kind of idea about where our visitors were coming from. It might be interesting to work with them in small groups to help me update this map. I have also begun to include material about our classroom routines and the topics and themes we will be working on. I know last year as Y2s several parents began visiting their community pages, and I hope that as the year goes on our parent partners will take an even greater interest as the children add content via their blog for themselves.

Little Patches of Ground

Over the last couple of weeks I have encountered a number of excited mentions of the online tool voicethreads. Voicethreads, at its simplest, is a tool that enables audio commentary to be combined with annotation and photographs or other digital images to tell stories. A voicethread also has the additional social dimension that others can contribute to your thread, by adding recorded or written comments.

The potential it seems from what I have seen and read sofar, is limited like many such tools only by how we might choose to use it. Here are a couple of really nice examples of how colleagues have used the tool personally from

John Johnston
Paul Harrington

Reading these threads has lead to an interesting thought or two about how this tool could perhaps be used in combination with or to extend/embed use of the simple Vodcast structure I played with recently in combination with the Tizz's Travels Frame.

A colleague of mine a while back mentioned a project she wanted to develop around the Idea of "My Little Patch Of Ground," Essentially this project would involve students in engaging with a similar idea to those engaged with John and Paul, photographing or originally drawing their favourite places, and features of the landscape and location and writing about them. We originally discussed using Multimedia Authoring Applications and Digital photographs to prepare the material for inclusion in the school website. However Voice Threads and MS Photostory now seem to offer a new way of looking at this project proposal, and one I must take up with my colleague on return to school.

Linking into the wider curriculum, as well as the obvious geographical possibilities, this project has a number of other potential links to Literacy and Citizenship. In the case of Literacy the exploration of visual genre is an exciting possibility, considering how we might use traditional written formats in support of our thread, perhaps through the use of the frame to present and perform poetry as the basis for a textured script, as well as the recieved potential for documentary type presentations and recount development. In terms of citizenship our engagement with our location, has the possibility for identifying and sharing the views of people around us within the context of common experience of a place. Questioning, engaging with and challenging through comparison personal perceptions about our place in space.

In terms of the use of Voice Thread, the completed outcomes are hosted remotely, with code available to embed the project into blogs, and this is a useful element for me, as it has the potential to open the use of class Blog Spaces to develop and share the projects. I do have a current e safety concern, as my last visit to Paul's blog pointed to a worry he had regarding comment moderation on the threads he produces. There are however others not the least of which at the moment is the LA Firewall, and not being at school currently I cannot check whether the widgets that hold voicethreads in place can get through. It woukld certainly be an Irony if having worked so hard to develop these, the students couldn't access and share their work in school. We will also have to consider the ways in which threads are produced, in terms of the visual information they contain, and the texts developed, however this is an exciting possibility rather than a problem, as it is a teaching point that could be used to engage students practically in considering how the projects they develop relate to our e safety guidelines when producing material for publication.

Voice Threads and Visual Literacy.

As part of my podcast/vodcast experiment I have been using MS Photostory and Podomatic, alongside my Blogger trial. One of the affordances of Photostory is an ability to like voice threads add real time voiceovers to the images included. Perhaps a step back is what I need to take at this point. (Ed.. almost a jodaism, a bit of quick editing will fix this! A stepback at this point, what I need to take, is perhaps. Aah thats better.)

In engaging with visual and multimodal texts, as with traditional texts we need real time examples, texts we can share, explore and evaluate, as we would a book. The voice threads above would be useful starting points, perhaps as a stimuls. Working through these, the students could engage in a similar process to that I was beginning to think about earlier. developmentally publishing their "threads" through a literacy context, and as PC users, within photostory. When finished, the "threads" could be exported as Windows Media Video and using a site like Zamzar, the completed texts converted to Quick Time (.mov) files for inclusion in a Vodcast created at Podomatic. The purpose of this is ultimately to create a sense of purpose and audience for the texts developed. In developing this project I might encourage my colleague to create a station at Podomatic called "little patches of ground," to where the vodcast "threads" could be hosted, and linked in to Tizz's Travels, either as a separate page with an embedded widget, or by embedding the widget in an existing section of the site with its back link to the Podcast. Linked to Geotagging this project could also be exciting, in locating the the patches of ground through quikmaps, tagging the map with file names or episodes, and perhaps embedding the map produced into Tizz's Travels or a project blog. This is worth exploring further, particularly whether this map might be embedded in the vodcast station.

While I am whittering, I have been wondering about the possibilities this might have for comparing places through time. I have wondered about the possibilities in the past for recreating visual landscapes, by engaging students with photographs or paintings from the past while trying to frame the same shot as it looks in space today. Our city scapes and landscapes constantly change, and it might be an interesting project to discuss with colleagues around the use of trails and digital media. Wonder how this would fit around the exciting create-a-scape work being done at FutureLab, it is quite similar to this project carried out in the Kings Cross area of London I guess. It would be interesting though to build on this to develop voice thread type presentations that combined student's interpretation of the then and now, on return with their data.

Tizz Visits the SS Great Britain and More

On Our School Website I have developed an area called Tizz's Travels. I posted previously about how he travelled to Spain and BETT, including how we had begun to experiment with various software environments and web based technologies such as geotagging to record his journeys. This has really begun to take off across the school, not just in Key Stage 1 where he was intended to replace Barnaby Bear, but also in Key Stage 2, where colleagues have begun to invite Tizz out on a more regular basis as students explore places closer to hand.

I have begun to open negotiations around the idea of Tizz having a blog of his own, like the amazing Max the Monkey who visited our website a while back from Australia. The idea being to develop empathetic writing by students in Key Stage 2 who could write a diary from Tizz's Point of view. I would also like to see some of our older students, using Tizz as a starting point in their work on a passport to the world, contributing imaginary visits to the school website, that younger students could explore. This could be a focus for web site development and multimodal text work, using 2 Create, 2 Create a Story, Photo Story and maybe even Podcasting. Our Geography Subject leader is currently applying for and putting together a Global School's bid, with the current excitement in some areas of the school about what the Tizz's Travels area is beginning to offer, and with the addition of web 2.0 environments and tools such as geotagging and empathetic blogging I can't help feeling this area of our website has powerful potentials in supporting development and evidencing this process.

Tizz's Travels: Adults Having Fun With 2 Create a Story

Have just spent a couple of really good fun days helping a member of our support team get some really exciting things out of 2 Create a Story. It never ceases to amaze me just what this tool can do. We haven't quite finished, but I think this is probably my fault not bringing the right file home with me, but what amazed me was seeing the real sense of achievement when the work was done, and the surprise at what was possible using this apparently simple kit as a multimedia authoring platform.

I had this idea a few years ago of building a zoomable website which would enable students to navigate the globe, zooming in and out of places they were studying and adding information, or uploading postcards and images people sent from their holidays. This became a bit more realisable after visiting world atlas.com and took initial shape during a geography focussed book week when we used Where's Wally? as a context for a whole school project. When our Key Stage One Students adopted Tizz The Bear as character to roam the globe with them early in the Spring Term, this seemed too good an opportunity to miss to play with and develop this idea even further. As students have been covering geographical topics I have tried to encourage them and their teachers to contribute material they develop to this space. This hasn't always been as successful as I would like, but the aspect which is now just starting to take off, is the idea of travel logs, and sending postcards to school from Tizz. 2 Create a Story with the ability to save files in swf format, may just be that additional catalyst I have been looking for.

My colleague, spent the morning with me and a group of year 2 students, while we prepared a writing frame together using screen captured images from a video. She had originally decided to use PowerPoint, to present her version of Tizz's Travel Log, but having seen how easily this tool enabled the students to build image supported texts, create animation effects and to use sound files, she decided this might be the tool to help her get the best from the materials she had.

Using teacher the options we have set up the software to give access to the full set of drawing tools, and this also enables on right click a file import, copy and paste option on a pop up menu in the drawing space. So to set up her travel log, she firstly imported each of the image files she wanted to use, sequencing these to tell her story as she went. In the writing space she added supporting text, before moving to add her animation and sound effects. When you are in the flow, confidence is growing with a piece of software and you have identified a purpose for what you require it is amazing how adventurous you can get and to what lengths you are prepared to go to achieve this. You cannot really imagine a visit to spain without the appropriate music, and in her final slide, as Tizz reclines on his last day, she decided she needed some Spanish Music. This was not available in the sound effects so we needed to aquire some. She had brought along a CD, and with a bit of playing around we used Media Player to extract the track she wanted to use in .wav format. Using Audacity, she spent some time trimming and cropping her file to extract about 10 seconds from the file, before saving it. Using the import a file option in the sound effects menu, she then attached the sound file to the page. To say that she had never used either piece of software before, the outcome was amazing, and from her point of view unexpected. This also, again demonstrates just how powerful this tool could be as a multimodal resource in the hands of young children, with teacher preparation, and student access to, collections of theme based images and additional sound files.

Combined with a zoomable and tagged map created at Quickmaps.com, this document is currently displayed on Tizz's Travels, on our school web site. As I said above, I think I brought the wrong swf file home with me this evening, and so will need to update these pages tomorrow to gain the full effect. Well Done Ms C. I am sure others will be inspired to follow in your footsteps...

Thinking About Email

Our LA are about to begin a VLE Pilot, and some time over the next two terms some of my younger students will be required to engage with that QCA or LA unit on E mail, as part of our schools' scheme of work. I have often thought about why we teach this unit where we do, and why E mail, a device with such powerful potential seems to be used so little as a learning tool in the classroom.

We use e mail with students in schools largely it seems as an ICT only resource, a device where skills based teaching takes priority over context, meaning and purpose. Yet without purpose and context there is no meaning to learning about or with E mail. In literacy sessions we work with our students to develop their letter writing skills, hopefully in situations where they have a particular audience and purpose for the final outcomes. Within an email environment then we should be expecting the same thing. For sure there are skills specific to emailing which need to be taught and learned, but why are we sending an attachment, what is it's purpose, who am I writing to and why.

I do not feel, that students should only encounter e mail as a subject in the context of ICT. Students and teachers alike would find E mail as a tool more exciting, if units were regularly planned, to include email as part of simulation activities within theme based and topic work. For this to happen we need to see email as more than a unit we teach at year 3, but as a supporting structure for wider curricular activity, which could start through the use of email simulation software in Key Stage one, and develop through shared class work as a starting point or stimulus for ongoing classroom activities with the real thing. I have published a bright ideas page to my website today, what a fantastic christmas present this was, to share some of my thoughts. How about an online interview with Henry VIII at yourschool.org.uk, or keeping in touch with that roving reporter Barnaby as he trots around the globe? What if we could talk to Katie Morag, as a pen pal? Recieve a mysterious time warped message from a Saxon Villager or Roman Soldier stationed at Hadrian's Wall or Caerleon?

A favourite session we ran with Key Stage 2 students a number of years ago, involved a simulated hot air balloon flight. Set up by colleagues from a local secondary school, the students used simulated data, collected by a local ballooner to track his mystery journey from Bristol, until he landed. Within the simulation they were required to keep in contact with him, imaginary flight controllers, the local police and to write and submit press releases for a newspaper we published later to a set deadline in school for parents and other students. It was great fun.

All of these things obviously take time to set up, but as with most ICT resources, once collected, made and saved, sample texts and materials are there to be developed, changed and extended for later reuse. With a view to developing creative curricular and the new longer unit formats for the Primary Literacy Framework, perhaps their is a place for email as a learning tool within these areas, acting as stimuli as well as the ICT tool it is often considered solely to be.

Visiting BETT, Software to die for and a geography lesson to boot.

Saturday last I spent at Olympia. I would have liked to have had more time obviously, but as a practicing teacher this rarely seems to be available. Instead a 6.30 start found myself and Tiz the ted, spending quality time together over coffee and a bacon sarnie at Temple Meads, and planning our day with the biggest and the best in the world of Educational ICT.

After photographs over breakfast, on the train, and in a variety of other poses and opportunities with British Giants like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and that marmalade loving bear, at Paddington, teddy clearly became concerned by the sheer volume of people and asked to be tucked away in my back pack. With Tiz safe and secure, I felt able to mingle and browse the items I had planned to see to my hearts content.

Visiting BETT with no pre planning, I have discovered to my peril, is counter productive. There is literally too much to see, and this visit I was intent on returning home with both my arms the same length. I was particularly interested in two software environments, but also demos from one Software house in particular. Anything else was a bonus, and as is usual on days out such as this I still managed to come back with a host of free goodies, keyrings, biros and mousemats by the score. However I am proud to say that this time I was able to say no, and only return with order forms and publicity materials that were the focus of my visit.

The highlights of my day were visits to the Softease stand and a live demo of their soon to be released podium software package, watching a several demos on 2 simple's stand, and seeing some of the new material developed for the IWB by Mark Cogan's Interactive resources.

Podium was of particular interest as I have given considerable thought to some of the ways podcasting or even just audio recording, using digital means, might be developed to support teaching and learning within my school. I had a flight of fancy in the Autumn Term, after visiting Storynory.com, when I considered the idea of encouraging year six children to record bedtime stories for sharing from our school website, with younger students. I wondered if digital publication in this way, might help them to develop a sense of audience, help them to think more about the purpose of expression and intonation during oral presentation. In thinking about how writing is for reading, and a recorded form of speech, it interests me how some of our children still seem to have the impression, that reading as something they do to or for their teacher. How do we encourage a love of reading if it is solely seen as work, and something we have to do. This was one of the things that really excited me about Podium, as despite its obvious power as an audio recording, presentation and publication tool, it seems at first glance very easy to use and accessible.

We are in the process of developing a new library in school, and I am working with my school technician to create a smaller networked space for use with focus and target groups. Podium does not only enable web based publication, but also publishing to a local network. One thought that crossed my mind was the possibility of creating a small talking books library, focussing on the ideas presented above, to encourage older children to record for younger children, the text from their favourite picture books. These could be played back through classroom PCs, or perhaps through MP3 players with speakers attached in book corners. They might also form a useful resource for a small group activity during a literacy hour. I am sure seeing the enjoyment others got from their reading aloud could be a real motivator, and combined with the ability to find the story that matches the talking text, would facilitate the younger students ability to access and make links between the words on the page and those spoken by a reading buddy or familiar older face. As a school we are also working to increase community involvement within the school, it would be intersting to involve community members in reading stories for inclusion in the school library, and using this technology as a resource to increase their understanding and knowledge of the technological world.

The obvious Radio Teyfant has struck a chord too, as we are part of a BSF project where our school is to be rebuilt within a larger campus structure. Documenting this process with the children we feel is key to establishing ownership and the future sense of community we hope this structure will provide. We have considered blogging, and timelapse video as two ways of documenting this process, but are now also thinking of including a weekly podcast about what is happening. A multimodal online newsletter. We are lucky in that we can see the changes from our classroom windows, but one of the schools to join us on site, is currently quite a distance away, and we want them to feel central to the project too. Before looking at Podium this seemed like a task too far, but I am beginning to see possibilities for using the tool to support this project, and further explore the potentiality of this new medium.

2 Simple provided another stopping off point and after a number of demos, the package I wandered away with for trial was 2 email. As I said in an earlier post, about control, I would like to see ICT based activity included in the role play areas of our younger children. I pondered on the making of baggage labels and tickets in the travel agents, but seeing 2 email fired another imaginative moment about how we might use this software tool with younger children. In the real world e mail is becoming a central part of communications, but it is not easy to simulate without giving some degree of internet access. 2 email it seems does just this, installed on a local pc it allows children to log on and go through the process of writing, sending, and replying to email in a simulated environment, where the files they send never leave the computer, classroom or school, but which can be picked up and replied to by other users within the class, and returned to their pc based inbox. I could see all sorts of possibilities for this within the Key Stage One classroom, as part of the office, or home developed for role play, with an adult taking the role in the hotseat, responding to topic or thematically based questions, perhaps simulating the role of Tiz the travelling bear during topic work, writing to the children in response to their assumed location. Perhaps giving clues for use with a preestablished and labelled map of the world. "I have just had my photograph taken with a very famous bear, he shared a marmalade sandwich and a cup of cocoa with me, before waving off my train from the station, a place that shares his name. I am in the capital city of England. Can you find me on your map? " Perhaps they could ask Katie Morag about her Island, the weather and the things she likes to do. Using the internet to look up weather conditions on the Island, we could send these back for the children to log on a weather chart comparing weather conditions in the Hebrides with those around school today.

Anyway, keeping my imagination in check for a moment, I also did lots more on my visit, but to be honest Tiz is getting a bit restless, and wants me to write about how we followed up her day out in school with the students. On our journey, as I said earlier we took some photos of Tiz. In school I copied these to the network, and our Key Stage One staff spent some time sharing these with the students as a slide show through Windows Photo Viewer. The students enjoyed talking about where she had been, what she had done and the statues in the photographs. Later in the week I used PowerPoint to create a travel log, inserting the photographs we had taken and sequencing the day to tell the story from Tiz's point of view. On our school website, we have a micro site space called Tiz's Travels, where we will be uploading and sharing her journeys with the wider community, but drawing on an idea presented in Anthony Evans Blog about Geotagging, I was inspired to include my first geotagged map in this space too along with the travel journal to show this particular day out in its Geographical context. Logging into quickmaps I used the zoom and search tools to help tag and label the main landmarks on this journey first, then zoomed out until I had the map view I wanted to display in the site. Pressing save and display code, the site generated for me the html I needed to include in my web page in order to access the map I had created. In combination with the travel journal, this tool I feel now broadens the context for discussion and sharing of the day out. We can locate the Journal in space, see roughly how far apart the locations are, zoom into the places where the photographs were taken, and see where the places are in relation to each other. If Geography is about understanding our place in space, then these tools together are very powerful tools in enabling this understanding to be developed. I have uploaded these resources to our Tiz's Travels microsite, but here is a direct link to the page in question, let me know what you think. Well back to the everyday, a haircut, shopping, and maybe with the supermarket's permission a few pictures for my new control and monitoring resource kit.