Snowshoeing with an Android

Over the weekend I downloaded some new applications for my Android G1 and thought I would give My Tracks a try while out on a leisurely snowshoe. While taking my GPS enabled phone on a quiet snowshoe through the woods in the middle of Minneapolis seemed wrong, I decided give it a try anyway.

The purpose of this post is say that despite all the gadgets in my life...I can still get out and go for a simple walk in the woods. Rats!

Here are my stats.

Total Distance 1.95
Total Time 01:00:07
Moving Time 00:39:15
Number of Tracks 1
Average Speed 1.95
Average Moving Speed 2.98
Elevation Gain 378
Min Elevation 716
Max Elevation 892

Google Workshop for Educators

Announcing the Google Workshop for Educators (formally the Google Learning Institute) in Hopkins, Minnesota on August 6-7, 2009.


Search, learn, share! Brought to you by the producers of the Google Teacher Academy, a Google Workshop for Educators (GWE) introduces participants to innovative ways Google tools can be used in education. The two-day workshop includes a full day of fast-paced presentations and hands-on activities including experience with advanced search techniques, collaborative web-based applications, and inspirational instructional strategies. A second day will be devoted to development of a proof-of-concept project and classroom application. Google Certified Teachers share ways they've implemented tools such as Google Docs, Google Earth, Google Sites, and... even more. Participants who complete the event are given access to the Google Workshops for Educators Network (GWEN), an online community focused on supporting educators as they learn more about the power of Google to drive student learning.

We are looking for creative participants (eager beginners to advanced) that have a desire to build on current skills and integrate relevant technology into the classroom. Participants should have a desire to collaborate online with other educators from the workshop and help support each other with questions and successes. Participants should bring their own ideas and be willing to look at big picture when pace is fast and dive into the relevant details during time set aside for application.

This workshop is designed to give participants an introduction to various Google tools plus an extra day to develop a "proof of concept" idea/lesson to be implemented in your own classroom. The Google Workshop for Educators is designed as an entry level workshop into the world of Google with room for personal adaption to higher level application.

Youtube - The Bombproof Sub Plan

Last week I created the bombproof sub plan. Seven minutes of quirky teacher-ness that the students would be accustom to and information about expectations and such straight from the horse's mouth. The Youtube video was embedded on the class website and was recorded for the intended audience...the students.

The problem is that they never saw it. For some reason the sub never played it for them. A sub's dream...push play and kick back. Students would magically do what they were supposed to do and questions would be answered. Of the 102 views in one day on Youtube not one of them was for the intended audience.

Try it! The Youtube quick capture video really is the ultimate sub plan, just make sure you tell the kids in the event the sub is a dud. Train a few kids in each class to be the tech helpers and make sure your sub gets to the class website for the day. I did this, but next time I will make sure the students insist on watching the sub plan as a large group to start class.

learning.21st (2.0)

Students will soon be registering for classes at WJH and I am hoping that learning.21st will take off next year. After a successful first year with 17 students, I am ready for the masses. Bring it on...and tell your friends to sign up too.

Teaching 2.0

Try and describe to 8th graders how transfer pictures and sources from 3 different computers using a server or USB drive to a common computer so you can make an iMovie. Then tell them that they have to huddle around one computer so they can "work together" and make a movie. Look at their faces. Hmpf!

After my Voicethread project went up in flames minutes before the bell (Java issues) I found myself scrambling to the the old iMovie standby. After a week of planning an authentic collaboration lesson (unfortunately, I didn't try it on a student computer) I was listening to the words coming out of my mouth and thought they sounded stupid, dumb and ridiculous. Why would I want to have my kids huddle around a computer to make a movie after getting them excited about the idea of them working on common project from different computers? Everything suddenly seemed so difficult. They were going to annotate, talk, type and video comment and now they are trying to figure how to swap pictures from different computers and how to change the length of titles.

Giant leaps....backwards! I took and deep breath and switched to Google Presentations. After a seven minute overview and sharing session I didn't really have another technical question for the rest of the block. There was one group, however, that forged ahead with iMovie, but they pulled out the USB drive during the saving process and lost their project to an error. The other groups don't have to worry about USB drives, saving, swaping, or sharing because I'm already a viewer on all their projects.



The Google Presentations highlight how technology should work in the classroom. It should make things easier, allow authentic collaboration, and be applicable to all the classes, not just this one project.

Chatting in Google Presentations!

Yesterday, our school had a 2-hour late start devoted to technology integration. The first hour was a large group session where we overviewed Web 1.0 vs. 2.0 and introduced Google Docs and ways it could be used in the classroom. The second hour was breakout time related to a specific topics (Activboards, Moodle and Google Docs).

During the large group session, the staff was invited to join the presentation online and follow along. What is nice about the Google Presentation tool is that it has a chat column that the audience can use for questions or comments. During the presentation I made the comment that students want to create and be active participants with technology and not just click links and watch. The comment/chat column in the Google Presentation is really great because it allows the audience to do more than watch and listen. There was a running commentary/dialogue that was approximately following the presentation and adding insights along the way. I thought everyone was very well behaved...was it because they were actively participating? Hmmmm.

There were a dozen or so staff members that jumped in and I decided to post some of the comments and chat topics during the presentation.

• Congress has it's own youtube channel now.

• There is some research out there that argues wikipedia is more accurate than an encyclopedia...I read a study where a person made over 30 deliberate mistakes, and theywere all corrected within an hour

• I've been using Google docs to get my ski team to sign in for races. It's pretty cool

• For our ALC team meeting notes, I type them in Google docs, and then we all have accessto them at all times - and can make additions, as necessary.

• the cool thing is that I can actually edit the document or make notes right on theirs as they type they like that immediate response

• google docs has a tool call revision history, too. So that if there was an innapropriateaddition to a document you can actually fetch back to the time before they added thatcontent and delete it.

• Sean and I used Google docs to write behavior contracts - we were both editing at the sametime. Worked perfectly.

Plate Tectonics...In Google Earth!

Google Earth is the textbook! It took a couple of classes but I finally figured out what to say to the students that were trying to figure out why we never seem to use a textbook while learning about new topics. For my most recent project the students used a customized KML file in Google Earth to explore the idea of Plate Tectonics. Students navigated different areas of the Earth to learn about the different plate boundaries and the landforms associated with them.

Every region of the Earth is paragraph in the textbook. The Pacific Northwest - Cascade Mountain Range is a paragraph. Iceland and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a another paragraph and so is the Mariana Trench.

All the placemarks that have been deliberately created are sentences (I created them in Google My Maps). Every YouTube video, every image and every word is helping to tell the story and emphasize the main idea.

Although I spent a lot of time putting the content together, I could finally sit back in (not really) in class and watch the students take it in at their own pace. If a student wanted more, we turned on the Wikipedia or volcano layer. If a student was struggling, we focused on the videos. Easy!

This book is different than the ones I never use in the class. It is dynamic. Almost every class period used different KML file because I would discover errors or glitches and correct them for next class. It is differentiated. The content can easily be adjusted based on the learner. It is also chalked full of media. I heard an NPR story about curiosities at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and the next day students were watching relevant YouTube videos of the only liquid sulfur cauldron this side of Jupiter. That wasn't known when my textbook was published.

Just saying. Thoughts?

Click here for the most recent version of the Plate Tectonics KML file.