It seems most of my recent posts have begun with an apology for not having written for sometime, or presented themselves as "false starts". The last year has seen my output diminish considerably, not because I have nothing to say, or share or because I have ceased working with young people, but rather the steep personal professional learning curve presented by new challenges. Working cross curricularly with older students has required more time focussing on the day to day, learning to adapt to life in a secondary classroom. But hey!
The Summer is here, and its time to unwind, reflect, review, refocus and reconnect.
To start the ball rolling I thought I'd share the Bird Box design created by a group of Phase 3 students for me during STEM Week. As members of a small company know only to us as "Avian Abodes" quality "Builders of Bespoke Billets for Birds," the students were challenged to research available bird box designs, identify and discuss the pros and cons of particular features of bird boxes, construct birdbox kits, identify the types of creatures that might be atrracted to or use their paricular kit, and to present ideas using their prototypes about how the kit might be customised using materials avalable around the home of a prospective customer.
Using ICTs to research and present our ideas and briefs, lead to discussions around how ICT might be included in the design, since several students had encountered camera kits. They were stunned by the cost, especially when we discovered the cost of building our box was around £3. One kit the students found including camera, and not disimilar to our own came to around £180, "thats way too dear," came one chirpy response. "What does it cost without the camera?" I asked. Around £60 was the reply. We couldn't identify how the box differed so enormously as to warrant this, and began wondering whether we could adapt our boxes, to use cheaper WebCams? How would we install them so that we wouldn't disturb the nesting birds and how would/could we establish a link between the box and a computer? Where would we need to site the box? How could we site the box to enable this? I really enjoyed the conversation, largely because it began engaging the students naturally with functional skills, as they created a possible new purpose for the kit, identified by them the audience. No conclusions were drawn from this but it was exciting to hear discussions as they began thinking outside of the box. The idea didn't fade, like so many often do, and periodically raised its head thoroughout the day. The opportunity to talk about monitoring systems, came and went, though I thought about a call out on Twitter. This is blocked in school, mentioning this as a shame, we again wended off the track, puns were raised about broadband links and how our feathered friends might atually like the opportunity to tweat with their mates... A half hour or so later and this bespoke billet of a slightly different kind appeared from beneath the pen of a group of Y7s, A bespoke twitter box for tweat clients of a different kind, and especially presented for a Geaky Teach to surf among his feathered friends.
Just pondering the possible mileage in considering how this discussion might be extended into a control and monitoring project for phase 3 any thoughts gratefully received :o)
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
YEY! Today after much of the waiting, with the baited breath, the anticipation, the pestering of the office staff and the arrival of the mail man, our Tesco Voucher order arrived, and with it...
the class set of Probots and our license for Probotix. Can't wait to see what the students make of these new tools.
I set up some year group blogs, with ethink, a month or so ago, and have begun introducing them slowly to colleagues as a way of sharing the ongoing work they engage in with students in class. My initial reason for introducing blogs, was an attempt to encourage a wider ownership of and engagement with our growing online community and website. It also struck me that the increasing use of the IWB in classrooms, meant an enormous amount of readily available and publishable work was going to waste. Shared and Guided writing for example consumes a considerable amount of our time in the literacy hour. Granted students use these as models to support their own texts, but saved to hard disc, this collaborative and high quality, guided and shared work, never sees the light of day beyond the classroom where it is made. One of the keys I feel in promoting the value of writing is a sense of audience and purpose. What better way to develop this than by sharing our work with people who visit our website, and enabling them to offer comments, that can help us to consider how we might improve our work, or better still praise and celebrate our achievements, and motivate us to keep trying.
I have spent the last couple of weeks working with year one students, initially using the space as a newsboard, and somewhere to share the things we have enjoyed doing in class. Today, we uploaded our first focussed use of the space. The students have been learning about plants and the conditions they need to grow. They have planted bean seeds, and will be keeping a bean diary. This diary will be developed over the course of a few weeks, with pictures and simple annotations as the bean grows. We began today to develop a digital version of the diary, using our blog space as a place where we can include digital photographs of the process, and as a class annotate these. Uploading the photograph and their comments to the blog together, means we will be able to share our "logging" process not only with each other but with a wider audience too. Although constituting primarily a science based literacy activity, this also introduces the use of ICT to sense and monitor change. At key Stage One much of science's AT1 is about making and beginning to relate observations. Using digital photographs we can capture visually the process of change over time and use visually captured data, to compare and contrast evidence, relating what we have done to what has happened. Through "thinking together" around these images we can introduce the vocabulary and explore and discuss the processes involved, drawing on the visual evidence we have collected. You can visit our bean diary on our year 1 blog, we would love to hear from you.
The control and monitoring strand of the ICT national curriculum has been idendified nationally as an area requiring development. I recently spent a day working alongside colleagues from my LA discussing and reviewing how we might address this concern where we work. At school, as I am sure is happening in many others, we are in the process of reorganising and replanning our curriculum provision, and part of my role this year is to focus on how ICT can support this, exploring how the available software and hardware environments we have can enhance or support the process, and forward planning for future needs.
My primary concern is that control particularly, is frequently taught as a stand alone area within the ICT curriculum, and I am increasingly convinced that the basis for many of our problems, is that as concepts, control and monitoring are considered to be outside of the daily experiences of many of us, or at least our interpretted potentials within the documentation we draw on to develop our wider curricular. They require us to use tools and environments which are not common place in our daily lives, or neccesarily intuitive to use. So relevance becomes an issue. LOGO for example as a control environment, seems to be an alien landscape and is an immediate turn off to many colleagues, though I have to admit, geek that I am, I still find LOGO to be a potentially exciting tool to use, and am frequently surprised by the power that this scripting language affords other more committed users. Engagement with the web, and in particular some of the Interactive teaching programs, and dynamic page content has given me a new handle on why such packages are important to use with students. "Flash" content such as Interactive Teaching Programs for example would be just interesting pictures, animations or visual models if they didn't involve some sort of scripting, with additional commands and instructions behind the interface, to enable us as users to engage with the presentation, or to change representations, reset and input new starting points. I have been known in the past, when I have come across an interesting web site design to wander off track, and to view the page as source briefly while working with the class, leading to questions like why did you do that? Or what is that we are looking at? It doesn't need a long winded explanation, merely something like, "well these are the instructions our browser uses to change this (the code) into that (the web page). "What we see is this glossy wow bit, when we down load the page with the pictures, buttons and animations, but the person who built the page probably spent some or all of their time working with the code or script we can see here as well." What we and the children often don't see when we engage with the web, is the person behind the technology, and I think it is important for the students to know that this content didn't magically appear, it was created by someone or a team of someones, somewhere else in response to the percieved needs of another someone, or team of someones. The fact that we can see it now is often a by product of this series of actions. At its most basic LOGO as an example programming environment affords a scripting tool which enables students to input commands and observe and evaluate the results of their actions as displayed on screen, for us as teachers it provides a starting point and context to scaffold and begin to support and explore one aspect of control in the wider world, and to begin making links between the work students do and the wider applications of programming and ICT generally in the real world.
Control and monitoring technologies today are widespread and very much a part of our daily lives. I asked my mum once as a youngster why we didn't have a remote for our telly, when my mates did. Her reply, why do we need one I've got you, go on it's time for us to watch a question of sport... I now use similar responses by the way, when asked why I don't have a dishwasher.... But these tools, which we use without thinking all rely on the basic concepts of control, input and output. Input from the remote brings about a range of outputs, they turn up the volume, change channel or set up the video before we disappear out to the pub. Magically and hypothetically of course, when we return home Match of the Day, Lost or Big Brother are there waiting for us. The Kebab, which has gone cold on the walk or bus journey home, gets stuffed in the microwave for 2 minutes while we walk away and get the TV ready and then on the ping, we remove our hot mass... Technologies constantly move on, and sky+ boxes now record tv to hard drives, allow us to rewind programmes in real time, enable us to watch the footie from a range of different angles and so on. Outside we may drive or catch the bus from home to school, stopping at zebra crossings and traffic lights, perhaps swinging by the supermarket where doors open automatically, metal gates swing in response to our passing, purchases are scanned and our spend calculated. We whip out our cards, punch in our pins and suddenly our wallets are lighter not just virtually I hasten to add. Most of our shopping trip has probably been recorded on video, and in the case of my local Supermarket, everything I have purchased has been logged, along with previous trips against my loyalty card, so that in a couple of weeks, money off vouchers relevant to my percieved lifestyle will fall on my door mat, whether I want them or not. At school my swipe card, supports a decision about whether or not I can enter the site, and after registration the contents of my register are inputted to the office system to record those present or absent, and calculate dinner monies. We cannot escape control and monitoring devices, they are a part of ours and the students everyday lives, what seems to have happened however is that we are so familiar with them, they have become mundain and lost in the world of the everyday. To create relevance to our curriculum and the learner, perhaps we need to draw these into focus, begin to look beyond the technology and make them transparent through our approach to classroom teaching and learning. A model of control in action is not that far away from many of my colleagues in the classroom today, its most prominant recent incarnation being the Interactive Whiteboard. Perhaps as starting points for control and monitoring units of work we should begin closer to home and draw on the everyday, develop ICT trails in school or "field trips," to explore where and how ICTs are used in the world around us, and identify and explore concrete examples of these. We could photograph, or video them, to facilitate a more evaluative approach to why they are used. What value do they add and what would happen if we didn't use them? We might also examine and explore what was used before these technologies? As learners it is easy to accept that technologies as they exist have always been here somewhere and somehow, or for us to label all ICTs as being computer driven, but our history is littered with tools that have enabled us to communicate, store and share information, with each other. These range from pictographs to formalised written alphabets, running messengers to ocean steamers to satelites, and the penny post to email and bulletin boards. This was my reasoning behind displaying an ICT timeline in our online classroom including hieroglyphs, the first formal writing systems, stage coaches, the first computer games, a history of the PC which included the typewriter, printing press and so on. When next we meet as a staff perhaps we should play with and discuss these images, to help humanise and personalise ICT development. Perhaps we could begin to consider questions such as what ICTs were available to the Romans, Ancient Egyptians and Greeks? What might have lead to the boom of ICT development in the 20th and 21st century, and how has the emergence of the telegraph from the 19th century impacted on this process? Would exploring the cultural impact of ICTs through history, support our understanding of the role which they play today, and enhance the relevance of ICTs in the teaching and learning process?
Sad as it may seem one of my jobs this weekend has been to find a zebra crossing and a set of traffic lights to video for this purpose. Pink and cold I sat in a local shopping centre, and later on Temple Meads station to achieve this. I am however planning to use Flowol with our year 6 students this term, and want to make the context for their projects as real as possible. I feel I can best achieve this by situating them in concrete settings. By combining the video I have captured with maps and aerial photos from Google Earth I want to broaden the context, to help them understand, not only how input and output effect the systems and artefacts we will control, but how the sequences and structure of the outputs support the purpose of the artefacts and sytems (DT speak) in their real world settings. Using my video alongside class based monitoring tools, timers and the like, the students will be encouraged to time the delays between flashes, and log and sequence the changes in the traffic lights first hand and to use these within the Flowol environment to control the mimics, drawing on this particular location as a real life model. I want to encourage discussions about whether or why traffic flow in one direction requires longer sequences of green light show than another? Why they think traffic lights have been considered necesary in this location? What problems might be encountered without them? To consider local places where traffic lights might be beneficial? Why we might have traffic lights in some places and Pelican Crossings in others? What are the differences and similarities between pelican crossings and traffic lights? These types of questions are intended to support the children in the use of geographical questions which they will be developing in class. Human Geography of this type, which is in essence town and country planning, also has links to Design and Technology, discussing and identifying needs, evaluation and disassembly, and application with short focussed practical tasks. They will begin to address the need to critically engage with the technological world around them, and begin to question purpose and application.
I will also be using LOGO this term with year 4 students in a series of guided investigations exploring ideas around the properties of regular polygons. I have carried this out as a series of Numeracy hours in the past, ending with the painting and presentation of images created using MSW LOGO in Microsoft Paint, developing rotationally symmetrical designs, or mandalas as the projects outcome. These designs, raise a great deal of excitement. We will work together as a community to explore how we can use the LOGO environment to construct regular polygons, and over time develop a shared recipe or menu, reducing extended routines to introduce repeat commands and build routines which result in the production of these shapes by a single word input. These will be saved by the students for later work. My aim ultimately is to promote understanding of the term degree as a measurement of turn, and to introduce and develop as the unit builds a context for the use of language related to the description of regular 2d shapes. Final stages of the project rely on a growing knowledge that a full turn is equal to 360 degrees, and that one command within a LOGO routine or procedure controls the amout of turn the turtle will make, one the number of turns and the other the distance it will travel or one of the shapes we have developed. Working together to collect factors of 36o, as inputs to help create their rotational designs, provides context to discuss not only shapes, but also to introduce the mathematical term factors, and the effects of multiplying and dividing by 10. There is also the possibility to explore the inverses of multiplication facts, and how these effect the patterns they produce. eg repeat 10 [hexagon rt 36] will produce a different pattern to repeat 36 [hexagon rt 10] and so on. Collecting and making shared menus of options and factors, means that the focus shifts constantly between knowing and using, and enables the higher attainers to be extended mathematically, while engaging those who might struggle in the overall purpose of the unit, the visual exploration and investigation of effect. Having a menu of choices provides a scaffold for less able mathematicians to explore and resolve ICT based problems of turtle control, using community based mathematical knowledge to overcome the barriers they might otherwise have in engagagng in the tasks. The investigation has purpose for everyone in exploring visually, shape, pattern and design, and provides a context to discuss and observe turtle control in it's mathematical context.
In establishing a foundation for this work, our youngest students must also have opportunities to engage with the ideas surrounding input and output. Christmas has already provided a wealth of starting points for this. For example working with Year 2 students yesterday, a host of controllable toys were shared as presents during check in. One child had even brought a programmable toy tank to school for show and tell, another a remote control Dalek, while many others excitedly talked about their new Playstations, X boxes or Nintendos. I was suddenly struck by how easily a series of activities could have evolved, building on this excitement and relevant experience. On reflection, during the session children were using sequences of talk which could have been redirected to develop around control and its concepts. Opportunistically we had found ourselves talking about what these toys do and the different user inputs required to bring about varying outputs as actions. Pushing buttons or levers made the toy move in different directions, make sounds, or turned on and off the lights. The discussion compared or described gaming controllers and how some had wires, while some didn't. How the function of the controller on one game changed according to what was being played, and how a new type of controller for a Nintendo required its user to simulate particualr actions in order to work in the gaming environment. Using catologues, digital photographs we could extend this type of starting point to develop displays or sorting activities, focussing discussions on comparing toys, games or other familiar artefacts that are controllable, not controllable; electronic, not electronic, make sounds do not make sounds and so on.
This type of activity could also be extended or emerge by exploiting other contexts such as the role play area, where we might use the social context to focus structured play around objects from home that use monitoring and control, such as the video, the TV, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner and fridge, or maybe in the travel agency when we provide calculators and telephones, or include the computer as a tool for practicing writing our name to make tickets, or baggage labels.
Having gone full circle, I am beginning to convince myself that I do need to broaden my view of control and monitoring, and am beginning to see how a range of activities and computer based peripheral devices, previously not identified for purpose could be considered for inclusion within a working definition of control and monitoring and then written into schemes of work or plans within the wider curriculum context. The computer itself, uses a host of input devices to bring about a range of outputs. Starting with the mouse which enables us to navigate and use software. The keyboard to input text, scanners which capture and input images and software environments which enable us to change the outputs produced as a result. Combining the use of video to develop animated movies within the literacy hour, linked to other cross curricular themes, or even the making of a podcast, or documentary/newstory, relies heavily on the notion of input, and the influence of users to create output. Does the consideration of bias in news stories, potentially link to control and monitoring in its widest sense. Our wireless keyboards, voting systems and slates allow us to move around the classroom and involve ourselves and our students as a community in engagement with a dynamic and constantly changing set of resources. Digital projectors and interactive whiteboards alongside these resources allow us to share and control a tool we once staticaly used from remote locations. Control and monitoring is perhaps more relevant and indeed prevalent in the curriculum and classroom now than it has ever been. One of the considerations I think I have to face, is how I develop the area to make its importance across the curriculum more transparent, discrete and evident in the activities we engage in every day. However I need also to make sure that this currently wooly view of control becomes more firmed up so to speak, and that it does not get buried and lost, in asssumptions that control is caught not taught. The view must include a shared understanding between myself and colleagues, that if such activities are to be considered as control and monitoring, they must be planned into and the ICT concepts highlighted and transparent within the teaching and learning contexts designed for.
Having wittered to my hearts content. I would value greatly any comments or contributions readers may have about this article.
In establishing a foundation for this work, our youngest students must also have opportunities to engage with the ideas surrounding input and output. Christmas has already provided a wealth of starting points for this. For example working with Year 2 students yesterday, a host of controllable toys were shared as presents during check in. One child had even brought a programmable toy tank to school for show and tell, another a remote control Dalek, while many others excitedly talked about their new Playstations, X boxes or Nintendos. I was suddenly struck by how easily a series of activities could have evolved, building on this excitement and relevant experience. On reflection, during the session children were using sequences of talk which could have been redirected to develop around control and its concepts. Opportunistically we had found ourselves talking about what these toys do and the different user inputs required to bring about varying outputs as actions. Pushing buttons or levers made the toy move in different directions, make sounds, or turned on and off the lights. The discussion compared or described gaming controllers and how some had wires, while some didn't. How the function of the controller on one game changed according to what was being played, and how a new type of controller for a Nintendo required its user to simulate particualr actions in order to work in the gaming environment. Using catologues, digital photographs we could extend this type of starting point to develop displays or sorting activities, focussing discussions on comparing toys, games or other familiar artefacts that are controllable, not controllable; electronic, not electronic, make sounds do not make sounds and so on.