ICT and Geography - Web Quest

This is my web quest that I have done for a Lower KS2 class. Unfortunately because I originally did this is word the format and the pictures have not been successfully transferred to the Blog (but this gives you the ideas and my opinions of this type of task at the end)


A Leaflet for an Alien

There have been recent rumours that funny looking little green men are on their way to Southampton.
We have reports that they are very nice, but they get lost very easily.

NASA in America, who has been monitoring their progress, has asked this class to create a detailed leaflet about Southampton, so that the aliens can know all about us and don’t get lost.

Use the web links and the questions below to answer the questions. You can then use these answers and any good pictures you find to create your leaflet for the funny looking green men.
*************
Can you describe where Southampton is?
http://www.dyslexia-england.co.uk/map-england.gif
Think of things like, what country and what county is Southampton in? Is Southampton in the north, south east or west of the country? What other towns and cities are close by?

Can you describe what Southampton is like to the Alien?
Use this web site to help, but don’t forget you live here too so you can tell the alien a bit about what you see when you look around in Southampton.
http://www.southampton.gov.uk/tabs/visitors
You can also describe things like the weather and transport in the city and the different types of jobs.

Could you tell the aliens why we have some really old ruins right in the centre of our city?
http://www.ecastles.co.uk/southampton.html
Because an alien may think this is a little strange.

There are plans to build a new IKEA shop in the centre of Southampton.
What do local people think about this?
http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/video/display.var.1119193.0.0.php
Can you tell the aliens how you think a big shop like this will affect you and the other people in the city? (questions that you might like to think about: Will it block up the roads or will it make more money for the people living in the city?)


NC KS2 1a,d,e / 2a,d,f / 3 a,c,d,e / 6 a,

This is for a KS2 Geography lesson. Probable for a year 4 or 5 class but can be easily adapted for year 3s and with a little more simplification it could possibly be used for KS1 year 2s.

I thought that creating a web quest is a really good idea as I have seen so many children told to go and research something with very little direction, or a list of web address with the children spend most of the lesson attempting to type them in correctly. Here all the children have to do is click on them and they are away. I think that this information could be used either at the beginning of a topic in order to spark the children’s imagination, or it could be used half way through a topic as it does as the children to use the information but to also reflect on their own knowledge and understanding of the city in which they live. I feel that this activity should be done in either pairs or groups of three of mixed ability, so that the children can share their prior knowledge and understanding and children with lower literacy levels can help the others. This is a great tool but the links must be checked by the teacher the night before the children are to take on the task because the Internet is forever changing and incorrect or removed links are likely to demotivate the children.

Logo

Today we played with Logo during ICT. It was not as exciting as I imagined. In a day where things move and flash to capture peoples (especially children's) interest, this was a very ordinary product. I can see its educational uses but at what age would you introduce it to children? Personally it lost my interest within 20 mins and I am meant to be a grown adult, what about the attention spans of primary school pupils? To me this was not very child friendly and I prefer to use the funky bee bots with yonger primary and roamers with older children.

The Wikipedia says:

Logo is a computer programming language used for functional programming. It is an easier to read adaptation and dialect of the Lisp language; some have called it "Lisp without the parentheses." It was created for educational use, more so for constructivist teaching, by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig and Seymour Papert. Today, it is known mainly for its "turtle graphics", but it also has significant facilities for handling lists, files, I/O, and recursion. Logo can be used to teach most computer science concepts

The final ICT portfolio task:

Summaries of reading and discussion.

Article one: Digital Natives. Digital Immigrants. By M Prensky (2001)

In this article Prensky discusses how the children of today are totally different than the last generation. They have changed, but not in the way seen previous generations. It is not just the fashions and languages that are used, instead this is a huge change in which there is no going back. This change is due to the ‘arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology’ (pg1). The describes how this is the first generation to be born into this digital age. Prensky suggests that due to this technology, this generation is able to think and process information differently. The term that he uses for this digital generation is ‘digital natives’ (p1) as they are all native speakers of the digital language. This makes the rest of the population, ‘digital immigrants’ because we have adopted this digital language later in our lives, we have had to learn to adapt to this new digital environment, but may not be completely comfortable with it because we can remember the pre-digital past.

Prensky then goes on to discuss how the biggest problem with education is that the digital natives are being taught by digital immigrants who are speaking an out of date language. They need to work in a different way, in their native digital way and education just can’t keep up with this. Digital immigrants don’t believe that the natives can learn whilst watching the TV or surfing the net, but this is just because they can’t. However, Prensky is stating that today’s learners are different. He suggests that smart immigrants accept the difference in the world and take advantage of their native pupils to help them learn and integrate. He also suggests that this change in the world doesn’t change what is important in education, but it does mean going faster and in a slightly different way. He suggests inventing computer games, but suggests that this can be very daunting and possibly impossible for the immigrant to master or even accept.

Prensky sums up the article by stating that if the digital immigrant educators want to keep teaching in this new digital age, they must change.

Article two: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part 2 Do they really think differently?

By M Prensky (2001)

This article follows on from the Prensky article reviewed above. This article goes into more detail into his claim in the first article that the teaching of digital natives should be via digital games as this is a good way for digital immigrants to reach the natives in their own native language. He states that recent neurobiology research shows that stimulation can actually change the brain’s structure throughout life and affect the way people think. The brain reorganizes itself throughout life. He also discusses how thinking patterns can change depending upon a person’s life experiences. It is a recent belief that people that grow up on different cultures do not just think about different things, in fact they actually think differently. And their way that people are raised actually affects the thought processes. However, he does not admit that the digital native’s brains have not yet been directly observed to see whether there are any physical differences between the native and the immigrant brain. Prensky suggests that this brain change does not happen over night. Humans have been training their speech orientated brains to be able to read by constant practice. It is the same to train our brains to function in the digital manner. However, this is easier for the natives, as the new generation have a very different blend of cognitive skills than the immigrants.

Prensky suggests that the natives do not in fact have short attention spans; they just have short attention spans for the old ways of learning. It is not that they can’t pay attention, they just simply do not want to. However he does suggest that the thing that has been lost by the natives is the skill of reflection. The challenge for the educators is to develop a way of teaching the natives reflection in their own language.

Prensky does not suggest that all computer games help children to learn, many are badly designed. However, good ones do produce lots of learning and engage the children. However, these are regularly rejected by educators as ‘sugar coating’ but this is because the children are enjoying their learning. However, he suggests that they should be real games, not just ‘drill with eye candy’.

After my experience in school, I can completely understand and agree with most of the theories that Prensky is putting forward in these two articles. I feel that he was right to move his ideas on in the second article because he left many sweeping statements unjustified in the first, such as the extent of use of computer games in education. However, I feel that he has left out a generation that comes in between the natives and the immigrant. I am one of these people. I was born in the 1980s. I do not feel that I am an immigrant because I was brought up with technology, we had computers through out my education (not many of them but we did have them) but technology has moved on at a tremendous rate since then. I do feel at times that I am being left behind and that the children develop amazing skills at a very young age but I also feel that I am not intimidated by developing and practicing my skills in ICT.

965 words, due date: April 23, 2008.

Update on placement internet connection

I managed to push to get the classroom internet connection reinstalled and it was!
Yay
It means that most days I can do a five min maths mental starter with the class using www.ictgames. com Its well work a quick look.
I use my starters to reaffirm the previous days learning in ICT.

It has also been very useful in science (bbc website) and in geography (Google earth)

My new gadget

Today I used my new ICT gadget in literacy.

It is a really cool dictaphone!
Boring you may think, but no! The children have been working on making a boring story of Little Red Riding Hood into an interesting one and I used the dictaphone to record each child reading their bit. I then downloaded it and have turned it into a CD. A few cheap CD's from the pound shop later and the children have some exciting proof of all their hard literacy work. They even made their own CD case to put it in.

Transferring the files to my computer was easy, but there is not currently any compatible software to turn the files into a CD. However, after about two hours of fiddling and pure determination I worked out how to change each file manually into a file compatible with burning onto a CD. Now it sounds so cool.

I am so proud of my year twos for creating this magnificent piece of work.

ICT in an out of school contect 23/1/08

The teaching assistants and I took groups of year two children for a walk around the local area to identify local landmarks and other prominent things in the area, The children had digital cameras to take pictures of the of the interesting things and buildings. It is part of the geography project ‘Southampton and out home’. The children will use the pictures in ICT lessons. They will upload them next week, choose some to print and others to put into a PowerPoint presentation. They must choose the pictures that identify and remind them of their local area.

Observation of an ICT lesson 10/1/08

The lesson was identifying the school and the pupil’s homes using Google Earth.

The children had already looked at paper maps in their geography lesson and had discussed where they lived, the country, county, city and local areas.

The ICT lesson was thirty minutes long as the class had to be split into two groups.

The teacher showed the children how to find the school using Google Earth and the children copied. For homework, the children were asked to write down their street name, which in the lesson they had to type into the computer programme. The class then discussed how it zoomed out to the whole world and then you could slowly zoom into the country, the city, they local area and then into their own street. This was to try to help the children get some perspective on the size of our local area compared to the rest of the world.

The teacher briefly discussed how the pictures were taken by satellite but they can be a bit old. At this point they looked back at the picture of the school, which still had building work and the children came to the conclusion that the pictures were about a year old. This was to highlight that the internet can be useful, but they must understand that it maybe out of date or wrong and that they must be careful when using the information found on the internet.

The role of questioning: Questions were used to move the lesson on, build understanding and confirm the children’s understanding. However, there was less questioning used in this ICT lesson then I had witnessed in literacy and maths.

Features to build into my own teaching: Children, even in year two have a good understanding of computers and the internet and can do complex things.

To remind children how to be safe on the internet and the reliability of it.

I am Sorry

I have neglected my Blog whilst on placement due to internet connection problems. So I will catch up today and do plenty of posting that I have saved up for the past month or so.

History and ICT

I have previously used ICT in history many times. The children that I have worked with love the interactive history games that can be found on the internet, on such websites as, the BBC History website. This site covers most of the historic topics that are covered in KS1 and 2 (and a few beyond). It has video clips, games, pictures that can be clicked on and explored, puzzles and printable sheets, to name but a few examples.

BBC history website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/

Databases

Databases would be good to use in both maths and science. Both of these subjects can rely on the manipulation of large quantities of data, especially if you are gathering results from a test or investigation from the whole class and are wanting to compare and look deeper into these results. For KS1 I would probably use databases as a whole class activity when gathering information, I would not expect them to understand the concept of databases or expect them to have the attention span or inclination to complete one themselves. In KS2 I feel that it would be possible to use small databases in small groups or more in-depth ones as whole classes.

I love this programme. It is so fun, and it is just how my brain works, in pictures, words and colour. I would mainly use this personally for revision, but would also use it with children as a whole class (not necessarily allowing year twos to try to do it on their own) but to record the ideas that the class come up with in the whole class teaching session. Then to print it off as a whole class memory aid for interesting displays.

The use of the Blackboard Discussion board

I feel that this discussion board is very helpful for the course as it is easy to discuss things, access it without having to know everybodies blog addresses, a simple way of submitting work and getting feedback from peers and if used properly a good source of information that is easy to access from home.

SBT1

I have a bit of a dilemma in my first school placement.
I am about to enter into my first placement and have started planning for my first week of teaching. The problem I am facing is that my classroom's internet access is not currently working and is not likely to be fixed in the near future. Now I know that IWB can be over used, but there is such a wealth of good ICT resources (games, audios, videos clips etc) that can complement certain lessons, but can not be downloaded. I also feel that many of the children that I am teaching are very visual and hands on learners and ICT resources, that the children never get the chance to use in this class, will help them turn complex abstract ideas in to contextual concrete understandings.

The use of Spreadsheets in school

The use of spreadsheets in school, is from my experience, mainly an administration tool used by the teachers. This is unfortunate, but I have to admit that the idea of spreadsheets have had me running to the hills to avoid them for many years. This is probably because many years ago I was trained in the very first version of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet ever created in my first job, and there was no short cuts, all formulas had to be typed and remembered in full. (Very scary!!!) This was only a little over ten years ago and I can understand why teachers may feel daunted at the prospect of teaching this to the children in their class. However, there is so much help out there on the web and already made resources and applications that with a little bit of time playing and trial and error a lot can be learnt.


Some suggestions and Ideas from the web of how to use spreadsheets:
Excel spreadsheets
If you have Excel version 5:0/95 or above, you can use these sheets directly. Click on the underlined links in blue to download. To use off-line, you need to save into a folder or onto a floppy disc.
The Doubling Machine
Click on the blue cell and enter a number. To reset, click Undo on the Excel toolbar:
The Halving Machine
http://www.kented.org.uk/ngfl/subjects/numeracy/sheets/double-double.xls

This sheet is used in the same way. It aims to show the ease of finding four times a number by doubling it twice. To reset, click Undo on the Excel toolbar:
What's my number?
This is a book of three sheets which give the sum and product of two mystery numbers. The numbers in the coloured cells can be altered to control the difficulty, by setting the maximum and minimum values for the two random numbers. Changing these values gives a new problem. Alternatively, click on the Sheet2 and Sheet3 tabs.
If you scroll the sheet down, the answers are revealed!
For more spreadsheets and MyWorld screens, visitDeal Parochial's web site

What is SKYPE?

What is Skype?

Skype is a free internet software for phoning and messaging. It can only be used if you have a broadband connection. You will need a good-quality headphone/microphone, and, after installing, you will be in contact with all other users of Skype on the Internet. You can phone or message them for free for as long as you like! Not only, you can still use Skype through your computer’s broadband connection to phone land or mobile phones in many countries of the world at extremely competitive prices. A phone call from the UK to Italy currently 0.017 euros per minute!

Information from
http://www.lexiconline.com/skype.htm

What are embedded links?

Links and URLs

From http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~hla/G5BIAW/lecture4/

HTML documents often have hypertext links in them which mean you can click on the highlighted text and the WWW browser automatically retrieves and displays the document named by the link.

The "hypertext link" is a clickable piece of text that retrieves and displays the object described by "http://myurl".

The source of the link is the text between the A tags, and the destination of the link is the value assigned to HREF inside the opening A tag.

The value assigned to HREF is usually a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

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URLs

URLs are names given to almost every chunk of information on the WWW. Most information on the Internet can be addressed with a URL.

A URL has four main components

1. a protocol specifier, e.g. http, ftp, gopher, mailto, file etc
2. a site/domain locator
3. a file locator
4. an optional within-file position locator

E.g.

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~hla/HTF/proceedings.html#session2

If no within-file position locator is given, the position defaults to the top of the file.

E.g.

http://www7.conf.au/cfs.html

points to the top of a page.

The above example showed how to link to a specific position in another document.

To link to a specific position in the same document (i.e. source and destination are in the same document), the value assigned to HREF can leave out everything except the position identifier.

How do I compress a file

This is how to compress a file using windows

Compressed files use less disk space so they are easier to store and quicker to send via email. Files that are compressed cannot be modified without first uncompressing them.

To compress files

• Open My Computer (just called Computer on Vista)
• Browse to find the file you wish to compress
• Right click on the file
• Select Send To from the menu which appears
• Select Compressed (zipped) Folder from the list of options

This will create a compressed folder with the same name as your file and in the same location. The folder will contain your compressed file.

To uncompress files :

• Open My Computer (just called Computer on Vista)
• Browse to find the file you wish to uncompress
• Right click on the file
• Select Extract All from the menu which appears

This will open the Windows Extraction Wizard.

3 days in and what ICT?

Apart from a literacy DVD that is used daily during milk time, I have seen little use of ICT so far in my 3 days of placement. I have only seen the interactive whiteboard used once so far even though I could identify many interesting possibilities. I understand that they have been having technical issues due to the restructuring of the school over the summer and the building works that were only completed over half term. I am hoping with the correction of the wireless internet links that I will be able to observe more use of ICT in the classroom in the future.

Cross curricular use of blogs

Well, myself and two other uni colleagues have created a really cool blog to help us with our science directed activity. We have created a BEAN BLOG that we all have access to, to document our beans progress.

Take a look :- http://pgcebroadbeans.blogspot.com/

We have found it very useful as we can work at our own homes and all contribute to the project without having to arrange meetings (which at the moment can be very tricky!). It will also be very helpful when producing the final report as all the information will already be collated in one place.