Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Great resources!













Images above: Students at Nuriootpa Primary School engaged in model making when studying the Landscapes unit of the Australian Curriculum: Geography

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au


Thanks for the great presentations on a resource of choice today. As you requested here are the resources presented in the workshop.

The focus of the resource presentation was to select a resource and do the following when showcasing to the workshop:
* connect the resource to the Australian Cuuriulum for history and geography
* describe the resource and its purpose
* justify the use of the resource
* discuss any limitations of the resource
* be creative in showcasing the resource.

Internet resources showcased

* My Place in History

* Ollie’s World

* Geography Associations ‘Planet Sport

* My place in history

* Voice thread

* YouTube clips - ‘Guess that Gadget’ series

* Rouse Hill House – Historic Houses Trust NSW

* National Museum Australia

* Google Earth

* Migration Museum of SA

* Whyalla Maritime Museum

* Scootle resource
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
* Geoscience Australia

* Australian folksongs

* Language map

* How well do you know your world?


Non-Internet resources

* The Aboriginal flag.

* 'Letters from Felix': Annette Langdan.

* An Inquiry suitcase of artefacts from India.

* 'The camel that crossed Australia': Alex_Anne Hemphill.


Thanks everyone for a great morning of resource showcasing.



Next week we have three groups to complete their formative presentation. The topics will be:

* Multiple intelligence and Blooms based on the Week 5 reading: Pohl, M. Gardners Multiple Intelligences File

* Negotiated curriculum based on the Week 5 reading: Hunter. Negotiating Curriculum File

* Assessement based on the Week 6 readings.

Geography in a connected curriculum














Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au


YouTube video of the trial at Nuriootpa Primary School.

Is connected curriculum the way to go for geography in the primary school

Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ8Q9jTRjaM&feature=youtu.be and listen to Sue Toone, Principal of Nuriootpa Primary School talk about the connected curriculum Geography trial conucted at her school in October 2011.

The trial focussed on the integration of the draft Australian Curriculum: Geography into the schools connected curriculum. A thematic curriculum focussed in 2011 on the theme of Past, Present and Future, with geography being integrated into the learning modules from Foundation to Year 7.

Thanks to the generosity of the Nuriootpa Primary School students and teachers in giving permission for their teaching materials and reflections to be part of this blog. In particular, thanks to Sue Toone, the Principal for the trial at Nuriootpa Primary School.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Fun is OK!














Images above: Students at Nuriootpa Primary School having fun.

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au


Using games in humanities

Understanding play is critical to understanding learning
Play is the basis for cultivating imagination and innovation
Seely and Brown

So what about this play thing? For many educators play is recognized as a critical tool for children. They consider that through play they come to understand, experience, and know the world. However as we get older (and the teaching force fits into this category), play is seen as unimportant, trivial, or as a means of relaxation and learning switches to something you do in school where now you are taught.

“What we fail to fully grasp is that play is the way that children manage new, unexpected and changing conditions, exactly the situation we now all face in the fast-paced world of the 21st century. Play is more than a tool to manage change; it allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change —a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century.”

Seely and Brown believe play as part of a new culture of learning does the above in four ways:
1) By thinking about the problem as a crisis in learning rather than teaching
2) By looking at the incredible power of new cultures of learning that are happening already and understanding what makes them successful
3) By tapping new resources: peer to peer learning, amplified by the power of the collective, which favors things like questing dispositions over transfer models of education and embraces play as a modality of exploration, experimentation, and engagement.
4) By understanding how to optimize the resources (and freedom) of large networks, while at the same time affording personal and individual agency constrained within a problem space created by a bounded learning environment.
Play provides freedom to act in new ways which are different from "everyday life" within a set of rules that constrain that freedom. Think of any game a kid creates of make-believe. It is both fantasy and it has to have rules (which may be arbitrary and even ridiculous), but what it results in is a world of imagination and something entirely new and innovative.


In short, play cultivates imagination and innovation, two capacities critical for individuals to function and be successful in the 21st Century.

Such consideration of play brings me to the idea of games and game-type activities (simulations, quizzes, puzzles etc) in the geography classroom. Here is just a selection of free game type activities/resources available on-line which could and in the view of Seely and Brown should be embraced by the geography classroom.

Fun is OK!

* Test your knowledge of world geography
http://www.geosense.net/

* Games for Change curates digital and non-digital games that engage contemporary social issues in a meaningful way. These games have been created by cross-disciplinary teams from around the world.

Ideas to inspire: Online Geography Gaming: This site contains links and background to hundreds of online games and simulations for use in the geography classroom. The site also has ideas and links to ICT and on-line collaboration tools. An amazing one-stop shop for teachers to incorporate games and fun into the classroom for students to learn.

Here is a selection from the excellent Ideas to inspire site (28 out of the 102 profiled on the site)

* Electrocity

* Stop disasters

* 3rd World farmer

* Sim sweatshop

* Darfur is dying

* McDonalds game

* My Sus House

* My abodo

* Flood Sim

* Google Flight Sim

* Sporcle: Place based games

* Place games and quizzes

* Classic Sim City

* Oil and extraction

* Free poverty

* Global rich

* Trans Aid: transport issues and aid

* Refugees: Against all odds

* Climate change Pentathlon

* Food force: Humanitarian food game

*Race against global poverty

* Climate challenge

* Earthquake: make a quake

* Urban plan

*Environmental quiz game

* Shipping

* Virtual volcano

* Map Zone games

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Bits and pieces worth a look














Images: Students at work using spatial technology.

Related sites to Humsteach blog
http://spatialworlds.blogspot.com.au
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au


* The Maplecroft site: employing spatial technologies and maps to assess risk. As a follow up to the “Risky Geography” Spatialworlds posting this site just confirms the potential of examining risk as a concept in geography classrooms.
The site contains over 500 risk indices and indicators, 100+ interactive maps, plus scorecards, briefings and in-depth reports for all countries and risk issues. Every week there is a new map of interest to the geographer.
The site also has a mapmaker.
The Maplecroft blog is also full of some great geographical information.

*Harking back to another posting, this time on saving the humanities, the site “4Humanities: Advocating for humanities" provides more great discussion on the need for humanities education in our schools.
The article titled “On the Value of the Humanities” by Martha Nussbaum and John Armstrong is of particular interest.
The articles published in The Australian by philosophers John Armstrong and Martha Nussbaum make the case for the value of the humanities and for the need to speak to a mass audience about this value. Nussbaum, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of the recent book "Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities", makes the case that the humanities are more important than ever.

* Finds home! Here is a great human interest story involving spatial technology.
An Indian man living in Australia has reunited with his birth family after 25 years with the help of vague childhood memories — and Google Earth.

* The World Water Day site is also a valuable resource for the geography teacher. Stay informed on issues related to this years World Water Day theme of 'Water and Food Security' by watching the interviews, documentaries and animations.

* Never get sick of this site! AirPano is a noncommercial project focused on high resolution 3D aerial panoramas. AirPano team is the group of russian photographers and panorama enthusiasts. During the next 2-3 years we plan to shoot the aerial panoramas and create the virtual 3D tours of the most interesting places of our planet.

* A great new resource called Global Words was released last week.
The twelve units of work in Global Words have been produced by World Vision Australia and the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) to integrate the teaching and learning of English and global citizenship education.
At the centre of both global citizenship education and the study of English is the aim of supporting students to become ethical, thoughtful and informed citizens, predisposed to take action for change. These units, and the supporting resources of Global Words, aim to build the essential knowledge, skills and values young people need to participate actively, critically and creatively as global citizens. A resource certainly worth looking at for geography.

* Another GIS option worth looking at
'A Gentle Introduction to GIS' at http://linfiniti.com/dla/
It uses Quantum GIS, which is free and open source and includes screencasts. The whole thing is downloadable so you can work with it offline.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Where technology stops and learning begins












Related sites to Humsteach blog
http://spatialworlds.blogspot.com.au
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au


Going past the “wow” and "GLAT" factor with technology!

As teachers in 2012 we are faced with a brave new world that is very different to what we expected in the 1970’s when many of us set out on our teaching career. How many of us in those distant days would have believed the nature of the world we now see as the norm. A world:
* where we can communicate by pictures and words across the world by the click of a mouse or the touch of a pad!
* where workers spend all day staring at a screen to earn their livelihood.
* where watching cricket on TV would more often involve watching computer simulations and GPS plots of ball trajectory and pathways than watching the real thing.
* where full length movies plus can fit on a 12cm disks.
* where going fishing would become a high technology activity using global positioning systems.
* where people would go everywhere from the golf course to the toilet with a telephone.
* where one can talk to a screen/pad and words appear and where words on the screen can talk back to us.
* where a computer the size of a coin can store and process data many times in excess of the computers in the 1970’s that filled rooms.
* where young people leaving school are likely to have a multiplicity of jobs and even professions in their working life due to rapidly changing technology

These technological developments are not isolated from schooling but have some dramatic implications for how we do what we do in the classroom. These emerging and evolving technologies of the past 30 years have left us with some fascinating conundrums as educators. The world of technology is all a bit like a fantastic toyshop full of wonderful playthings for us to hope for next Christmas. As with the toys in the shop we know that the toys of technology come at considerable cost, that they can be dangerous, they can be of limited usability, they break, we have no idea how they work, they take a while to learn how to use or build and can waste our time when we should be doing something more “useful”. Despite our reservations there is a “wow” factor that can overwhelm our reservations and drive us towards engaging in a particular technology. This engagement can be the result of a good news story from another school, a conference experience or just an advertisement floating through our staffroom pigeonhole. After due consideration we decide that the investment in the technological software and/or hardware will enhance student learning and we take the plunge. The magic gear arrives and with a sense of excitement we start playing with the purchase. In some cases it can almost be like Christmas morning with all the expectations and excitement of getting a new toy. After getting over the personal enjoyment of playing with the new purchase, one needs to turn to the reason the technology was primarily bought, not for the teacher’s enjoyment but to enhance student learning. Here is where the conundrum begins. As an individual it is easy to see the useability of the technology but how can it be turned into a meaningful educational tool. Yes, fun is not a dirty word but you have just spent half of your year’s budget on this technology and you assured the Principal that it would revolutionise education in your school to be a world never before seen. Moreover how do we make the technology go beyond the several lesson “wow” period and turn it into a long-term educational experience to enhance learning, as was the original intention. Having set the scene for the arrival of the technological wizardry in schools I would like to move onto my own experiences and to the issue of when the toyshop turns into a classroom of “good educational practice” or rather where does technology stop and meaningful and extended learning commence.

My story relates to the use of Geographic Information Systems in the teaching of Geography. GIS, as it is called, has been around since the mid 1990’s as a potential classroom technology but for me it all started back in 1997 when I visited the Geography Department at my old University with my Year 12 students. Looking forward to showing my students the light tables and cartographic drawing tables that we all slaved over in our undergraduate days, I was in for a rude shock. Instead, the Geography Department was room after room of computers. What the goodness was going on! Remember, personal computers had not been invented when I was at University in 1972. Whilst these white boxes dominating the Geography faculty did not surprise my students, I could see them thinking, aren’t we doing Geography at school? If so, why don’t we ever visit the computer rooms at school when it looks like “real” geographers use computers all the time? As a committed Luddite I was somewhat perplexed by the experience and went back to school the next day with a challenged perception of Geography in the classroom. In essence I was still teaching Geography the way my favourite teacher taught me in the 1960’s. Wasn’t it due to his influence that I decided to do Geography, so if it worked for me surely it was fine for my students? Despite


this rationalisation in defence of teaching in the past I realised that things had to change, and fast, if I was to really be teaching Geography for the good of my students and their future prospects. So at that point my
life changed and it never has been the same since! Now GIS dominates my teaching experience and hopefully has enhanced the quality of my teaching. However before finishing my story I need to relate the complexity of events that have led to my present contented state.
The journey has been torturous and painful but well worth it. The first step was to go to the toyshop or rather software providers and get the required GIS software. Believe me it was everything one could dream about as a Geographer! As map lovers, Geographers get extremely excited by normal maps but this toy called MapInfo enabled one to make personalised maps of a high quality using copious and varied data. No wonder the light tables had gone! This brave new world of mapmaking was unbelievable! Night after night of “playing” on the computer followed but I was still not ready to take it into the classroom. The learning curve for a non-ICT person was steep and easy to follow classroom orientated materials were not available. However I had financially and professionally committed myself to use GIS in the classroom. So what was needed was a “GIS for dummies” and I was the perfect dummy to write it. After a few false starts the document was ready to launch on my students. The first lesson was genuinely scary. As teachers we expect to be in control of process and content. My struggle with the technology meant that I was in a position of vulnerability. The students I was teaching were more technology savvy than me by far. What if I couldn’t help them when they were stuck? However what evolved over the next weeks was the most liberating teaching experience I had ever had! Although the facilitator of process I wasn’t the technological expert. I can genuinely say much of my “GIS for dummies” teaching course was developed from the question “how did you do that?” That was me asking that question and not the students! We were underway and the process went smoothly and the students learnt how to use the programme and gained the required GIS software skills. Tick to the technology part but had I enhanced their spatial learning. Wasn’t that the reason for the financial investment and the late nights? Rather I had to ask myself had I just bought a toy, played with it and now will I want another toy with all the new bells and whistles. Herein lay the conundrum. How could I turn this great technology that my students had mastered into a meaningful educational experience for their spatial learning. Had I used technology for the sake of it or could I turn it into a means to an end.
In review I had noticed some interesting by-products of the skill development process. Firstly the students had worked together extremely well in groups and peer tutoring was the norm for the class. Secondly the students no longer saw me as the source of definitive knowledge but a fellow learner with some useful spatial perceptions. Thirdly I had sensed a feeling of empowerment and ownership of learning amongst the students as a result of their mastering of the technology. As a result of these observations I decided to set in place a learning model for the use of GIS and the associated spatial learning that built on these quite unexpected student outcomes. If I was to make the use of the technology an educationally meaningful experience I needed the students to develop some relevant and achievable tasks to apply their skills. Before this stage of application a contextual stage needed to be delivered that transferred some of my spatial expertise to the students. Basic geographical skills and perspectives had to be taught before the issue to be explored was developed. Such traditional content was delivered via some good old fashioned map interpretation exercises and the use of the wonderful inter-active CD Roms and websites now available to the Geography teacher. However the GIS application topic that was the core business of the next stage had to be developed by the students. Topic ownership and relevance was crucial if the technology used was to be meaningful. Much to my surprise the students came up with some very creative ideas. As a teacher, normally being the provider of ideas, it was at times a painful experience watching the students try to come up with original ideas. But one thing was assured, when the pressure was on, all groups came up with something unique. They now had the skills, the spatial context and the idea. Once the parameters of the application studies were set, the students went out into the community to gather data and then back into the computer room to develop their spatial representations or rather maps. From there the final stage was to analyse the spatial representations in line with the original problem developed. Real, community based and relevant learning had happened via the use of the “wow” technology! As a Geography teacher, wasn’t my goal to teach students about the spatial world in a meaningful and enjoyable way?
In fact, the GIS process met this goal way beyond my expectations. Students had become involved in:
* Developing a geographical question and hypothesis.
* Selecting an area or site to conduct the fieldwork.
* Deciding what data was required.
* Going out and collecting original field data and acquiring data from organisations.
* Creating their own databases in preparation for map making.
* Creating a spatial representation of their data.
* Making valid analysis and conclusions about what the map showed in
relation to the question/problem established at the beginning of the project.

An interesting perspective on the use of GIS in the classroom and the associated spatial learning is the identification of the “good” spatial learner in GIS classes. The “expected” student achievers are not necessarily the ones who are the stars in the GIS class. In many cases the students who achieve the extraordinary spatial learning are those who struggle in the normal academic classes. It seems that the use of GIS unlocks the ability of students to employ their spatial cognition skills that have not previously been required in their learning. Conversely some of the more “academically” able students find only moderate success in the GIS class. It is interesting to explore the proposition that the use of GIS and the associated spatial learning is often neglected in the classroom. That is, a neglect of the area of spatial literacy that sees students developing a perception and understanding of their place in space. Maybe GIS is the vehicle to help teachers to develop and expand these skills that are not just innate but can and should be taught for a person to become an effective member of the global community. One could say that such a spatial skill is incredibly relevant to the concept of “Globalisation” that we as citizens are grappling with at the present moment. As one commentator observed:

“spatial thinking is an holistic system where all knowledge is interconnected in space.”
Quote from http://www.giftedservices.com.au/visualthinking.html

Surely such a quality of learning and knowledge is desirable for young people needing to have a worldview and a spatial perspective to their everyday life and experiences.

The actual technology was merely the tool of learning and a means to an end and not an end in itself. The learning model gave a framework to structure the classroom experience but more importantly the students had become empowered by learning the technology and could do things that were only dreamt of back in the days of light tables. GIS projects exploring recycling rates in the council area, Streetscapes around the local areal and water quality in West Lakes have all won National environmental Spatial Industry awards over the past three years. However one shouldn’t just talk of the award winning projects. In the eyes of the majority of students their own original research was as important and impressive as those gaining community recognition. The GIS research work detailed below gives an insight into the originality, community orientation and diversity of content facilitated by the use of GIS technology.
Groups of students studying Geography in my classes have successfully investigated the spatial problems of:
* Where in the local area would the environmental health be the best?
* Where would be the best place in the local area to locate a Multi-Purpose Complex that included a health centre, cinema and restaurant?
* Whether there is a correlation between crime statistics and unemployment statistics.
* Where would be the suggested location in the local area for a family to build a house with specific requirements such as being within a kilometre of a high school, accessible to public transport but at least 2 kilometres away from public highways, within a kilometer of a park and within .5 kilometre of shopping facilities.
* Would the community facilities provided in a high socio-economic area be better than those offered in a lower socio-economic area?
* Whether the rubbish bins around the school are located to optimise collection?
* What are the football allegiances (AFL and SANFL) across the local area?
* Whether there is a difference in health and lifestyle factors such as smoking, drinking, food intake and exercise habits across the different socio-economic regions of the local area?
* Whether there is a difference in household energy consumption across the local area?

These examples show how GIS can develop high-level analytical skills amongst students by the exploration of some rather everyday local area topics. Not bad for students generally considered as not academic and/or not positively engaged in learning! What then did these students have going for them to make the conceptual “learning leap”? Basically, I consider that they had a technological skill that gave them a sense of empowerment and a strong sense of ownership of the learning process. In turn this enabled them to be pro-active in their learning by the using their surroundings to apply the skills of GIS.

So in conclusion, where does technology stop and learning start? One can summate that it is when the toy turns into a tool or rather when the “wow” factor of using the toy is replaced by the “wow” factor of discovery and relevance engendered by using the tool. To my surprise I am not visiting toyshops any more because the GIS toy has turned into much more than a toy but rather one of the most enjoyable classroom experiences that myself and many other Geography teachers across Australia have experienced. The blackline master is being left behind as Geography reinvigorates itself and hopefully students will perceive that Geography is more than just drawing maps on light tables but a very real experience relevant to their everyday life.


By the way, GLAT stands for, "Gee Look At That!" The enemy of the meaningful use of technology in the classroom.


Here is a challenge! How can we move this site of amazing 360 degree images from GLAT to meaningful learning!