Far Reaching Projects...

Our experiment with web publishing tools has allowed us to share our projects across the district and community with ease. Who knew we would become so literate in sharing with web tools? It has been more than maps that we have been able to personalize, and the student and teacher excitement for this work has been contagious. With these tools we create a space for our students to share real life experiences and interests about the world.

We have enjoyed the chance to expand our classrooms beyond the walls. Potentially across the world.

Some highlights have been maps of students worldwide learning and experiences. Our students have explored the local community, connecting their interests with their shared map. Others have created instructional videos or explored the geology of the surrounding area. We found that literature can be explored though a map, sparking an interest in one class for families to take trips to Washington, D.C.!

And that is what we are finding is key, using tools that get students to show up with something to share. Maps offer a motivation to explore and create life lessons beyond the classroom and school day.

We continue to discuss the appropriate use of the internet by students, and how we can assist them in navigating this resource.

For more on creating, teaching and learning with these tools, check out the rest of this blog. Please join us here to share your experiences too!

Publish! Share! Collaborate!

Do you have a project to share with your school or local community? Do you have a map to share? Videos or a survey to publish? Create your own website in minutes... really! Today we placed our maps on our very own Google Site. This makes them easy to share in a link... and a blink!

If you have a Google account, click on the more button at the top of your Google screen. In there you should find a button called "Sites". Click to get your own website.


Above you can see the editing menus for the website editor. That list on the left includes some of the things you can easily insert onto a website. Click here for an example of how simple yet useful a two page Google site can look. This is the site for the Ridgewood Explorers (they are my second grade class). Their families are participating in the project.

This type of publishing can also be done through a wiki.
For a great wiki example check out www.RidgewoodTour.com.

Today we also discussed potential directions for our projects and assisted one another with projects. Next week will be our last meeting. We hope to share the current state of our work. We know there are many students who will benefit from these kinds of tools and opportunities to use them.

Google Earth!

Today it was time to play with Google Earth! You can play along by downloading it here: http://www.google.com/earth/index.html

We like the, "Try to break it." learning strategy... click and see what happens! The toolbar at the top of your Google Earth window (see below) has some great features to test out.



What can you find? It's fairly easy to use, and there are many ways to use it in your classroom. Seven year old students at play with Google Earth still amaze me. After one session with the software they're creating placemarks and tours, deep sea diving and Mars roving. What can you or your students create with it?

The collaborative slide show below offers some educational suggestions. Click on the arrows to play the slide show.
Get slide show updates here:
https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dhn2vcv5_175fp5qg9d3



Our class website has some info on today's explorations. Here you can find a scavenger hunt to try as an introduction to Google Earth:
https://sites.google.com/site/mapsinquiry/using-google-earth

While at play, we found that we can measure distances (in smoots!), create our own placemarks, and record tours of particular areas. The information we embed in Google Earth is not so different from what we've done in Google My Maps. And what you do in Google Earth can be shared on My Maps and vice versa. Just look to export or import ".kmz" files.

Some .kmz files we've enjoyed can be found here on Google Lit Trips. This site allows classes to upload their Google Earth tours of literature. Check 'em out! Play them for your students, or better yet, create your own!:
http://www.googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/Home.html

Happy publishing.

Ridgewood Map Challenge

You can add videos and photos (and more) to a Google My Map!? Yup! It's really a fantastic feature of Google My Maps; it allows the maps to come alive with rich, home grown, content. Any project, unit, experience can be easily published and distributed on a map in video, photo, text and more.

We decided to go for it. We spent some time struggling with a bug here or there, but in the end, each participant added video to a personally created map. Surprisingly simple. We're ready to go and start making maps for our courses and sharing the tools with our students and colleagues.

EMBED!

Note! Teachers, when you embed your video from YouTube, be sure to turn off the 'Include related videos' check box. You never know what videos are going to show up here. Often videos relationships are based on keywords, and algorithms, not on the topic or true human judgment. The internet, no matter how many people participate, is not actually intelligent. :-)

Want to try our Map Challenge? This is the map course we worked on today:
https://sites.google.com/site/mapsinquiry/video-links

Have a cool idea for a Google My Map project? Share it here: http://goo.gl/mod/sNGU


Get out there and have fun!

Marks on the Map

Our Google Maps Inquiry group is looking to make great use of this internet tool. We spent some time searching through current examples of maps, curious to see what's out there. While there are a few good examples, this is a largely untapped publishing opportunity for students and teachers to explore and share learning!

Today we looked at a few examples and then checked out a few resources we've gathered on Diigo. We are sharing our links here: http://groups.diigo.com/group/google-map-inquiry


We gave the technology a try by uploading information about ourselves to a group map. You can see our personal placemarks in the photo above. We will use this map to experiment... and hopefully make a mess of it, learning from these attempts.

Look for us to share some great projects; ideas are already flowing!

Want to try Google My Maps? Log in to your Google account and click on My Maps on the Google Maps page.