Google Earth resources for teaching Earth Science and more

I was recently asked by a science teacher for resources she could use to independently learn about Google Earth. While I have in no way come close to conducting an exhaustive search, here are a few resources that seem useful. They are pages I bookmarked mostly after finding them via Twitter or blog posts so I offer thanks to those who publicly share information.
Overview and Introduction:

Google Earth overview ISTE webinar (duration: one hour)
This is an archive of the online webinar titled Google Earth Lessons in the Classroom, which includes audio and slides, published by ISTE. Dr. Alice Christie presented this overview of using GE with students on October 29, 2008. It is available for free to Dwight-Englewood staff via the Blackboard A Teacher's Toolbox course under Learning Unleashed > ISTE Webinar archives. A more detailed description and information for others to purchase this archive are available here.

Recording of a hands-on introduction to Google Earth (duration: one hour)
This is session one of an online, hands-on workshop led by Thomas Cooper on 2/9/09 as part of the Powerful Learning Practice program. You can follow along with if you run Google Earth while watching. The session includes information on the Oceans component. Here is a description copied from the PLP newsletter:
"Google Earth can be integrated into almost any discipline. Students can use the tool to explore natural features, historical monuments and characteristics of cities. The greatest power of this tool lies in its ability to promote inquiry-based research and collaborative action."

Earth Science:

Designing and Creating Earth Science Lessons with Google Earth User Manual
Published in May 2007. Creation of this manual was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Other Subjects:

Google Earth has also been used by teachers of other subjects. For example. Google Lit Trips can be used to help students better understand a novel through familiarity of the geography of a book's various locales. Of course, contemporary and historical maps can be useful in multiple disciplines. I have not explored the sites below much, but they are a place to start if you are looking for more.

Google's Google Earth for Educators page
Published by Google and includes ideas for classroom use in multiple disciplines.

Google Workshop, Part 3: Google Earth at the Assorted Stuff blog
Includes links to tutorial videos and other sites with resources related to Google Earth.

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I'd be grateful to hear feedback about the usefulness of any of these resource for the next time someone asks. Therefore, please add a comment to this blog post or email me at campbb AT d-e DOT org (if you have a comment you don't want to make publicly). Also, if you have another resource that you would recommended to teachers, please add it via a comment.

Interested in an interschool, middle-school collaborative project?

The primary audience for this post is teachers and technology facilitators who might be interested in partnering on a Middle-School/Junior High joint English and Social Studies project in April 2009.

Seventh grade students at Dwight-Englewood School are studying the way in which colonial powers divided up Africa and the lasting effects of these political divisions on the African people. I have been working with two creative seventh grade teachers on planning a project for this unit that would involve sharing information and collecting feedback from students at a different school. While the planning for this is still ongoing, here is what we currently have in mind.

D-E students (two sections working in groups) will be charged with creating an web-based lesson (probably using a wiki) to be completed by the students at the school we partner with. Our students will present maps of the continent of Africa showing various divisions such as cultural boundaries, population, natural resource, etc. Each of our student project groups will also create pages of related content resulting from research on various aspects of the topic such has the specific effect caused by each of the European colonial powers involved.

Your students would be asked to use a web browser to read and comment on this content, which would probably include a guiding question to answer for each content section. At the conclusion of the lesson your students would be asked to reflect on this information and synthesize a response answering how they think Africa should be politically divided including annotating a map of Africa as part of the response. (There is no single correct answer to this question.) After the lesson is completed by your students, ours may do the same final exercise and share the results with your students.

Our students' goal would be to create a lesson that could be completed by your students in one class period assuming each of your students or groups of students working together have access to an Internet connected computer. D-E teachers will help guide
our students to stick with that length, but of course, seventh graders who have little previous experience creating lessons will be doing this so that won't be perfect.

The tools to be used for this have not been completely decided yet, but here are some of my initial thoughts:

• Content will be created, viewed, and commented on using a wiki. I've had some recent, positive experiences with pbwiki so that will be the first one I checkout to see if it can meet the needs with regard to content security and user management.
• Your student responses could be through wiki comments. However, there is some interest in providing the option of allowing audio comments to be left by using a tool such as VoiceThread. This might be particularly useful in providing a place for answering the final question that asks your students to annotate a map as VoiceThread allows commenting (text, audio, or video) combined with drawing on an image. We do not have experience using VoiceThread with students yet, and I have not worked on the details nor potential difficulties related to your students possibly needing to register and login to VoiceThread in order to comment so that complication may prevent its use.

As I can work out the technology tool details later, our first priority is confirming we have a partner school so we know this will be a viable project to be started very soon. Therefore, if you are interested in having students at your school participate in this project, please contact me (Bill Campbell) as soon as possible via email (campbb "at" d-e.org), Twitter (@BillCamp), or by commenting on this post (and including contact information in your comment).

Update 3/12/09:
I realize that I forgot to add that if you partner with us and would like our students to provide feedback on something your students create, we would be happy to do so. (Two classes at D-E are doing this project.)

Also, for those of you interested in the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, I'm reading chapter 5 now, and I realized that the project we are proposing seems related to student-created, instructional content delivered through a "facilitated user network" as described in that chapter.

Update 4/2/09:
We will be using PBwiki to publish content and partner school students will respond via wiki comments. (Still investigating VoiceThread for final question.) Student research on the topic is already under way, and we will introduce the wiki to our student publishers on Monday.

I still don't have a firm commitment from a partner school so if you are interested, please contact me.

Vicarious NAIS conference participation

As someone who uses Twitter to keep on eye on what others interested in education, technology, or both are talking about, I discovered that some of the 2009 National Association of Independent Schools annual conference attendees were sharing the proceedings through blogs and social networking tools such as Twitter.  As a result, I've now had a small glimpse of the conference through the eyes of those others who were gracious enough to share. Since I found some of my vicarious conference participation on Thursday and Friday worthwhile, I'd like to share some of the resources for others who might be interested.

Jason Ramsden (@raventech) and Sarah Hanawald (@sarahhanawald) encouraged live online conversation and blogged notes using the Cover It Live tool during the following presentations. (Click on the name of the blogger to access the notes.  Sessions with two bloggers listed have separate notes from each.)

• Sarah: Setting a Course for IT Success
• Sarah: Revitalizing the Veteran Teacher with Peter Gow
  
• Sarah and Jason: Opening General Session with Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
• Sarah: Creating Artists of Learning with Mary Cullinane
• Sarah and Jason: Michelle Rhee on Reforming Education
• Jason: Michael Thompson on The Impact of Technology on the Lives of Boys
• Sarah and Jason: Guy Kawasaki on The Art of Innovation
• Sarah and Jason: Closing Session with Oprah Winfrey

As you read through the recording of the Cover It Live session, you may notice comments marked with a Twitter symbol and some may seem like a non sequitur.  Those comments automatically appear in the blog session because the author thought that Twitter posts from selected authors or on specific topics might be germane and, therefore, interesting to those viewing the live blogging session.  This relates to the next resource.

Instead of creating a live blogging session dedicated to a particular presentation, many other conference attendees used Twitter to post short messages or quotes of interest while attending presentations.  Many people who posted messages to Twitter before, during, and after the conference marked these messages with the keyword #nais09 (called a hash tag).  That made it easy for people using Twitter during the conference (whether actually there or not) to follow some of the activities. You can see a list of all of the Twitter posts tagged with that keyword using Twitter's search tool.  The entries are listed in reverse chronological order, and people continue make Twitter "micro-blog" posts tagged with that keyword as they write related articles after the conference.  This is how I discovered most of the content about the proceedings. (If you are really bored, you can scroll through the that list of twitter posts and find the announcement I recently made about for this blog post.)

If you have read this far, you might be short on time, but you can quickly read some of the best conference quotes and highlights that were posted to Twitter according to Liz B. Davis (@lizbdavis) in her blog post Gr8T Quotes from #NAIS09.

Thank you to Jason, Sarah, Liz, and everyone else who shared the conference live via the web!

For those who prefer more depth and less conversation, there were also three official conference bloggers:

• Jonathan Martin (head-elect, St. Gregory College Prep, AZ)
• KaTrina Wentzel (Mounds Park Academy, MN)
• Michael Obel-Omia (The University School, OH)

While I have not had the opportunity to explore all of their work, I did find Jonathan Martin's post "NAIS: Nine Highlights, Takeways, & Observations on Oprah, Rhee, Thompson, 21st. c. Learning, Chicago, and More" interesting.  Jonathan (@JonathanEMartin) also seemed to be a prolific user of Twitter during the conference so I believe he has included the input of others in his writings.

This experience provided me an interesting example of how blogging and social networking can connect people to a traditional conference when people actually in attendance are willing to share.  This is good news for us life-long learners who don't necessarily have the time or other resources to traditionally participate in theses events.

As I find other web resources of interest specifically related to the 2009 NAIS Annual Conference, I will post them under the nais09 tag of my delicious bookmarks, which you can access by clicking here.

Do students really know how to read online?

The following quote from the weblog of Will Richardson, an advocate for the use of communication technologies in education, caught my attention:

[Online reading] is one of those areas where the kids are doing it already and the educators in the room don’t have much to go on in terms of what the differences are or any substantial practical experience. Federman makes the point that when new technologies enter the classroom, teachers see change. Students, on the other hand, see the status quo.

In his post, Richardson discusses the article "Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming" by Mark Federman. Richardson also admits that without an intentional, personal effort to read longer texts more often, increased effort was necessary "to do sustained reading and thinking [and] to stick with complex narratives."

Online literacy is necessary in our current world and in the future. Obviously, continuing to require long texts as part of academic work continues to provide students the opportunity to learn and practice the related traditional but important literacy skills.

So a question hanging out there seems to be what can teachers and parents do in order to help children transfer some of those skills to online reading and, therefore, further practice those skills?

P.S. I have no answer. However, I wonder if something like the recently released 39 Clues book series from Scholastic would help (at least for younger students) or is it just creative marketing. I haven't seen a novel from the series (but probably will since my son would like it), but it appears to promote some sort of bridge between offline and online reading, (Also, seems to bridge the trading card frenzy familiar to anyone with elementary aged boys.)

Research report says one-to-one computing and use of online assessment is on the rise

A May 2008 article in eSchool News reports that researchers surveyed about 400 school administrators between April and September 2007. This resulted in the 2008 America's Digital Schools report by Thomas W. Greaves of The Greaves Group and Jeanne Hayes of The Hayes Connection.

Here are some of the findings and related quotes:

• The quantity and quality of one-to-one computing programs has increased since 2006.
  
  
  
  • "one-to-one computing is not a fad, but has lasting efficacy"
  
  
  • "one-to-one computing can only be successful through teacher ownership"
  
  
  
  


• Online formative assessment is a trend on the rise.
  
  
  
  • "The use of … online assessment … suggests a real improvement in using tests to help students learn what they don't know, rather than beat them over the head- after the fact--about what they don't know."
  
  
  • "The only major inhibitor to online assessment, according to survey respondents, is the lack of suitable student devices with which to take the exams."
  
  
  
  


• Interactive whiteboards (such as SmartBoards) are now viewed as "standard equipment".
  
  • "The report predicts that [interactive whiteboards] will be in nearly every school five years from now."
  
  
  
  


• While use of learning management software (such as Blackboard or Moodle) has increased, its full potential has not be realized.
  
  • "Schools frequently take less than full advantage of the available applications."
  
  
  
  


• Internet bandwidth "remains in a state of crisis".
  
  
  
  • "The average amount of bandwidth needed per student has climbed some 123 percent from year to year."
  
  
  • "Two-thirds of those polled say they have implemented a policy to restrict the use of certain applications in order to conserve bandwidth--including banning streaming video."
  
  
  
  

Learning to Change video

Thanks to twitter and Arvind Grover (NYC independent school ed-tech director), I just came across the five minute video "Learning to Change" via his blog 21apples. It is a professionally produced compilation of video comments on technology in education from multiple people including Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind.

The notion of students being part of a community larger than just their school and using that as part of their education is promoted. With that in mind, the following quote from the video interests me in particular:

"You start with the teacher. If I want my students to be making global connections, then I'm going to give the tools to my teachers first and provide them with opportunities to connect with other teachers around the world or other teachers around the country."

That reinforces the notion that teachers need to get connected beyond their school and be provided the technical resources (time, tools, and training) to do that. While some teachers have been doing something like that with an email listserve for years, there are a bunch of newer tools out there that might be more effective and definitely are more appealing to students. Kids are already using some of these for non-school work. Why not leverage their existing skills and interest to further their education and foster a passion for life-long learning?

To read comments about the video (or to add one yourself), check out the YouTube page.

If anyone at D-E has enough interest to spend some time on this, but needs a little help to get started, let me know!

Motivate writers via blogging

During the conversation at our last Teachers and Tablets meeting, Fred our English department chair made a the statement that writing submitted just to the teacher is practice. That and the rest of the conversation concerning writing, one-to-one computing, and chapter four of Mark Warschauer's book Laptops And Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom gave me an idea on how a weblog might be used with writing.

Whether the main purpose of the assignment is to develop a particular kind of writing (i.e. persuasion) or to practice writing in order to more deeply understand a particular topic (i. e. a historical event or work of literature) this activity seems like it might be useful for high-school or possibly middle-school students.

What I propose is that a class blog be setup such that every student in the class have the ability to post an entry as opposed to just a comment. (The Upper-School Reading Team and MS book review blogs are examples at D-E.) Students would then be assigned to go out and find a piece of writing on the Internet (another blog would allow trackbacks, defined below) that raises an opinion on a topic.

If the purpose of the lesson is to practice a particular kind of writing such as persuasion then students could be allowed to find something expressing an opinion different from theirs on any topic in which they have a strong interest. Otherwise, students could assigned a particular topic. In some cases, it might make senses for the teacher to identify a collection of sites or weblogs that focus on the a particular topic being studied. Some search engines that specialize in searching weblogs, which could be used by either a teacher setting up a lesson or by students searching themselves include Technorati, Google Blogsearch, and others.

After finding something appropriate to read and respond to, each student would then post a reply on the class blog to what they read. This reply would be done as a "trackback" comment to the original post. A trackback shows up as a comment to the original post (if this feature is supported by both blogs). Its function is to promote communication between blogs. An except of the post would appear on the original blog as a comment with a link back to the students post on the class blog. (If the automatic trackback isn't supported, a student could just manually post an excerpt with a link to the full post.) This post on TabletTails is an example of using this procedure to comment on a Teachers and Tablets post.

This assignment could have the following advantages:

• Students need to evaluate the writing and credibility of an outsider whom they can't assume is an expert.
• Students have to critically read to prepare for writing.
• Students' writing has the potential to be directed to a particular audience besides the teacher.
• Students have the opportunity to be motivated by the chance of their writing being read by an outside audience.
• The opportunity for authentic feedback on the topic is possible through the original writer seeing the comment and responding.
  

If any teacher at D-E is interested in pursuing this, please let me know. We have already have the software available, and I am happy to discuss it further or help you get started.

By the way, if you checkout the Teachers and Tablets webblog, don't let the label "Listen to podcast of article", which refers to the audio files mislead you. The audio recordings are not the text of the blog posts. Sometimes the discussions are closely related to the text of the blog posts, and sometimes the conversations wander from what is written. However, they have all been very good so if you have some interest in one-to-one computing and literacy, give a listen, and post your reaction as a comment to the blog.