Teaching Hacks.com

Tim has kept me busy with all the awesome breadcrumbs he has been leaving around Google Earth and Google Maps. I used the multi-placemark batch encoder to create placemarks for all the schools in the TCDSB, and that was easy

On another note, I was curious about an area that in Northern Canada on Google Earth that I thought was odd located at lat=66.4160464337, lon=-73.2254883091. It is an area of the Foxe Basin where the water is a light blue color and there are what looks like perfect circles in the land mass nearby. (and they are not alien crop circles)

With Google Earth a student could ask me such a question, what does an educator do? To find out the answer I went to the Natural Resources Canada web site where they have an Ask-A-Geologist section. I submitted the question with a few screen captures of what I was seeing. I was really impressed with the detail and quality of the responses I received from Natural Resources Canada.

If you are interested in the responses you are going to have to download and open this Google Earth file to read the placemarks.

Comments(2)

The Weblogs In Education portion of the wiki is coming along well.ÂÂ

I’m been working on:

• 6.1 Blogs and the Math Curriculum
  
• 6.2 Blogs and Writing
  
• 6.3 Blogs and ESL
  
• 6.4 Blogs and Second Language Learning
  

I’m not the type of person who likes to think about the difficulty of a task until I am immersed in it. I find that too much time is often wasted on arguing why something is difficult or can’t be done, without even trying to do it. So that’s the idea behind this whole project.

I figure I will have a good base of examples, ideas and content to be comfortable with in the Weblogs in Education section by April, and then I will switch my concentration to a different section.

Comments(0)

I had some fun looking at the K-8 Ontario Curriculum and mapping the expectations back to ideas around using Google Earth. I realized that Google Earth is to Social Studies/Geography what calculators are to Mathematics. It helps students to gain insight and delve deeper into physical geography. There is so much potential across the curriculum subjects as well.

I wonder if there is Google Earth anonymous group for teachers that I can join because it is so addictive. I have been taking tours and siteseeing from the Nile to the Antarctic and back again. I have been adding awesome overlays that I have found in the Google Earth Community including weather, cloud cover, and even other planets.  Google Earth is like a pocketknife for the classroom teacher.

A couple of good starting points for educators:

Digital Geography

GOOGLE EARTH RESOURCES FOR GEOGRAPHY TEACHERS

Comments(0)

My ice fishing trip in Haliburton was cancelled due to some serious snow squalls up north, so I am continuing my brain dump online and trying to broaden the scope to come up with a practical guide for K-12 on Web 2.0. I am pulling in the curriculum areas where I have seen weblogs being used and expanding out from there to the various read/write tools. I don’t want the tools to drive the creation of the document but the different uses that I have observed mixed in with some ideas. I also want to include examples as much as possible. The main idea is to make something that is practical for educators and leaves them feeling that they can use Web 2.0 even if you are not as Marc Prensky puts it “a digital native.”

I am using wiki to help organize my thoughts, as I did for the RSS Ideas for Educators document. It is a closed wiki for now, but if you can’t resist joining in on it’s development contact me and I’ll send you a username and password. As always, the wiki document will be CC Licenced.

I started some work in the Blogs and Math Curriculum section. I am sure my situation is similar to yours, there are not enough hours in the day, but I will slowly plug away at this document.ÂÂ

As I always have done, I have to keep any development I do on this wiki seperate from what I do during the day at the TCDSB. They are really particular at my board, that anything I do while I am working during the day the board owns, not me. So even if I want to place a Creative Commons License on any work I do, I can’t because I don’t really own it. I find it hard to swallow, but my knowledge of Canadian case law in this area is minimal.

Comments(0)

I don’t know how long this will ast so I thought I would post it right away. Stenhouse has made ten of their books fully available online. When you click on a link go down to the table of contents and download the chapters of the book.

ÂÂ

Comments(3)

(Left to right: Chris, Tania, Diane(2), Suzanne, and Janice) And Ken jumped in.

The first Ontario Edublogger meetup went well. The first day of the Leading Learning conference offered a nice time and date to meet with other edbloggers, those that are interested in blogging and share some stories. Konrad wanted to meet with us, but he couldn’t be there on the first day of the conference. We will definitely do another meetup at the ECOO conference. If others are interested we might try to meet earlier, just email me and we can try to organize another meetup.

Comments(4)

The sessions I attended:ÂÂ

Day One - Audio Reflections (WAV - 404 kb - 4:13m)

1. Return on Imagination: Fostering Imagination through Technology in an Accelerating World Tom Wujec
2. Enriching Curriculum & Overcoming Distances with Interactive Videoconferencing in the Classroom Dave Nash, Elaine Shuck & Robert Bernola
3. “You want to let the students to do WHAT???!!!” Jeff Catania
4. Digital Literacy and Teenagers Pete Levan & Ronda Lenti
5. Taking Podcasts to School John Maschak
6. “Multimedia, from Webquests to PowerPoint, Movies to Blackboard” Richard Pierog & William Lee

Day Two - Audio Reflections (WAV - 612 kb - 6:23m)

1. Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society Mitchel Resnick
2. e-Learning Ontario – Innovation in Ontario Education Alison Slack &
   Carolijn MacNeil-Verbakel
3. Learning Objects - e-Learning Ontario Rose Burton-Spohn & Don Snider
4. Rich Site Summary is Changing the Web – Will it Change our Classrooms? Quentin D’Souza (RSS Presentation Handout)
5. Networked Writing Communities: Improving Writing Skills through Reflective Collaboration Konrad Glogowski

The audio reflections come from my cell phone on the way home from the conference.  My voice mail is automatically sent to my email address when I don’t pick up the phone.  Since the .wav file was so small, I decided to post it as is. If you have trouble playing it, let me know, and I will put it in another format.

Comments(0)

For the most part, I really like the materials that come out of the Media-Awareness Network.  This organization tries to provide both sides of internet safety and other media issues – the good and the bad. They have lots of useful materials in particular – look at the educational games section for some great products that are ready to use.

A blogging statistic stood out as I was reviewing the site:

Over half (52%) of all blogs are developed and maintained by teens ages 13-19.

(Source: Georgetown University , Gender, Identity and Language Use in Teenage Blogs, 2005)

Considering that the number of blogs seems to be increasing exponentially, when I look at some of the blogosphere stats from Will’s blog - “Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs.”

I’m thinking – we have this many students writing – good thing. Now how many educators do I know in Ontario that are harnessing this excitement? Yikes! Well this number is growing. I always enjoy reading Paula Boon over at Ontario Blogs at the Education Network of Ontario and keep an eye out for the growing list of educators and students blogging there.

Going Off On A Tangent Here … I still think the Ontario Blogs environment and layout is a little too clunky, but it is an excellent start and I often recommend educators in Ontario start there. ENO has a good support network and excellent people working on the project.

Going Off On A Bigger Tangent Here … Tip for other school boards in a Micro$oft environment: November Learning Communities seems to be a customized version of Community Server (just guessing because it is so similar in look and feel) which we are using it at our school board and is working great. The Community Server version is free if you keep their logo at the bottom of the product or for a minimal fee replace it with your own logo for school district branding.

Comments(0)