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LEARNZ team filming

Powerful storytelling using Google Earth for Web

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Fionna Wright
LEARNZ team filming
Image by CORE Education, all rights reserved.

Most people would tell you they love a good story. Stories can change our attitudes, help us form opinions and even inspire us. Many educators use storytelling to create engaging and emotional connections for learning.

LEARNZ has been creating and sharing great stories through virtual field trips for over 20 years. Our stories are about people, actions and places around Aotearoa, and abroad. These are captured using video, text (diaries), images and live web conferences, all published on the LEARNZ website.

Recently we have been exploring ways to create a more immersive and interactive experience for learners and teachers. This has included the use of creation tools in Google Earth for Web. Creation tools are free for teachers and ākonga to use to support personalised learning, including inquiry, project and place-based learning. They are a great resource for teachers and students to explore and present New Zealand history, for example.

1. What are creation tools on Google Earth for Web?

Creation tools enable interactive map-based storytelling, using geospatial technology, satellite and 3D imagery and are integrated with Google Drive. They work on Chrome, Android and iOS, computers, tablets and phones. You can create placemarks, shapes and lines to showcase locations. Placemarks present a location as a satellite image or zoom right into a 3D street view. You can also attach text, images and video to each location, then organise, and collaborate on a story to create an immersive place-based narrative.

A recent example of a Google Earth for Web story created by LEARNZ is our Expedition Fiordland trip. This experience takes students from Te Anau airport by helicopter to the Pure Salt NZ M.V. Flightless vessel, where students are invited to explore the remote and rugged islands and the fiord in Tamatea–Dusky Sound.

Google Earth– LEARNZ Expedition Fiordland online field trip >

2. How do we use Google Earth creative tools in our own classroom? 

Explore:

  • Open Google Earth to find out more about this application and its potential use.
  • Launch Google Earth for Web. Then select from the creative tools in the panel on the left of the browser. Expand this panel to see more.

Google Earth image of the world.

  • Use the ‘Voyager’ option (ship steering icon) to explore current map-based stories from around the world.
  • Search for locations, street views and Voyager stories that students are interested in. The Feeling Lucky option will take you to random destinations around the globe.
  • Explore the LEARNZ Google Earth field trips and supporting resources on the LEARNZ website to see how we have created narratives around places, people and their inspiring stories:
    • LEARNZ River Restoration tour– supported by its online field trip resources
    • LEARNZ Rail Safety tour– supported by its online field trip resources
    • LEARNZ Climate change tour– supported by its online field trip resources
    • LEARNZ Expedition Fiordland tour– supported by its online field trip resources

Create:

  • Select ‘Projects’ to create a map-based story.

LEARNZ field trips shown across Aotearoa on Google Earth

  • Select the ‘New project’ button. You will be asked to create a project in Google Drive, so it’s important to ensure you are signed in to the correct Google account. This is because Google Earth will integrate with this drive. There are a number of ways to start and create files, but we’ll just outline one way.
  • Projects provide you with the ability to ‘Search’ to add a place, ‘Add a placemark’, ‘Draw a line or shape’, or ‘Create a fullscreen slide’. Have a go with the various options or watch the tutorial accessible via this panel.
  • Select the small person icon on the bottom right of your browser to go into a street view of a location. This provides an immersive 3D experience of a place. In the image below, we are visiting the Waitangi Treaty Grounds museum:

Street view of the Waitangi Treaty Grounds museum on Google Earth.

  • Select the ‘Edit’ feature on a place you have saved and have a go at adding video, uploading images and writing descriptions to create your story about a location. There are a range of features you can use to make your story more engaging and immersive.

LEARNZ uploads videos for each online field trip in two foundation platforms so we can embed video into other LEARNZ online spaces:

  • LEARNZ on Vimeo (1,900 LEARNZ field trip videos for teachers and students that are free to use)
  • LEARNZ on YouTube (New)

To add video into a Google Earth story, you will need to upload them onto a YouTube account. LEARNZ does this using the same Google account that we use for our Google Earth tours. This keeps everything in a central location.

Present and share:

Share the link to our Google Earth story in ‘Present’ mode. If you have used images and video other than your own, ensure they have a Creative Commons license before sharing. When presenting and sharing your own or your students’ material to a wider audience, you may want to consider applying a Creative Commons licence to content you and they create.

Find out more about Creative Commons licencing >

Another thing to consider when creating and sharing place-based stories is mātauranga, intellectual property and correctness, especially when it concerns the interests and rights of mana whenua. It is important to do your research and connect, and consult with key people as required. This could present a good learning opportunity for both you and your students.

There is so much more to this tool than presented in this blog post!

The best way to discover its potential is to have a play. Better yet, let your learners have a go. The LEARNZ team believes Google Earth for Web provides a user-friendly platform that supports engagement, personalised learning and key competencies, and it can be adapted to suit virtually any topic or interest. It is also an immersive way to tell the stories about places, people, initiatives, culture and history in Aotearoa.

Find out more about LEARNZ >

LEARNZ online field trips

Providing immersive online field trips at no cost to schools around Aotearoa.

Find out more about LEARNZ >

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Instigating sprints to support transformational change and innovation in schools

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Fionna Wright

learning-sprints-transformational-change

Change is the new black

Educational change is inevitable and it’s all the rage (although some may argue with the second half of that sentence). A rapidly evolving and turbulent world, our growing understanding of the nature of learning and, in New Zealand, the need to change how our education system performs so that Māori students enjoy and achieve education success as Māori (Ka Hikitia – Accelerating Success 2013–2017); all mean that educational evolution is here to stay.

The challenge with educational change these days seems to be the amount and sometimes exponential pace of it. This volume and speed creates a need to look past previous iterative approaches to improving teaching and learning, and instead, become transformational as we strive to evolve our own practice in both a rapid, and meaningful way.

However, effectively managing transformational change is a change in itself. Transformation calls for innovation, risk-taking and creativity; and engaging in mahi where the outcomes may be unknown. Without resources, time and support, this form of change can feel overwhelming, laborious and like it’s ‘on top of’ an already saturated workload.

In a previous post I co-authored with my colleague, Rachel Westaway, we suggested that school leaders explore Agile values and principles to support transformation and innovation in schools.
In this post, I will delve deeper into an agile tool called ‘sprints’ that supports teams to work through transformational change; hopefully experience some creative freedom; and provides a framework and process that promotes embracing uncertainty while minimising risk. This way, managing change and innovation should not be overwhelming and may actually be enjoyable.

What are sprints?

The concept of sprints originated in the IT/project management world where they are one of the key components of the scrum framework, supporting people to work collaboratively to address complex problems and unpredictability. Scrum is founded on agile principles, with an emphasis on creating value, and making progress through regular reflection, adaptation and teamwork.

Sprints enable teams to work collaboratively to tackle large problems or significant change by breaking down the work into small, time-boxed, increments (a.k.a sprints) and focusing on what is most important.

In the education world, the sprint approach can be used to manage, improve and innovate on practice to support our learners’ needs, allowing educators to be more adaptable, creative and flexible in working through significant change. Sprints can be anywhere from one to three weeks long (as a guide only). Put simply:

Using a sprint approach can break down and simplify what can seem to be an overwhelming, long-term challenge, into smaller manageable parts.

Agile Schools has developed Learning Sprints; a programme that provides tools, resources and professional learning. They recommend 3 key phases in a ‘learning sprint’:

1. Prepare

a. Define: What student learning outcome do we want to focus our practice improvement on? For which students? What evidence justifies this decision?
b. Design: What small, specific actions can we take in our classrooms to improve student learning?
c. Assess: What evidence of student learning will we collect?

2. Sprint

a. Teach: In what ways are we deliberately improving our teaching practices?
b. Monitor: How are we collecting evidence of student learning? What is it telling us?
c. Support: How are we harnessing peer and expert feedback?

3. Review

a. Analyse: What progress did students make and how did our actions contribute to this?
b. Transfer: How can we transfer what we’ve learned into future practice and ways of working together?
c. Reset: What professional learning could we engage in next, in order to help us maximise our impact on student learning?

Implementing sprints in a teaching inquiry

The sprint process is strongly underpinned by evidence-based practice and therefore aligns closely with the Spiral of inquiry. Used as an approach within a longer-term inquiry, sprints can provide an opportunity to evaluate the impact of our actions over many cycles within the wider inquiry space. Not only does this allow new learning to become embedded in the way we work but the speed (velocity in ‘scrum speak’) at which the team can move and adapt is accelerated.

However, before contemplating the use of sprints within an inquiry, it is important to discover and define what is going on with our learners. The scanning and focusing phases of a teaching inquiry will support us to create collective learner statements about targeted students in a particular educational community. We can then explore how these challenges relate to the nature of learning (OECD 7 principles of learning) and the Key Competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). The NZCER Remixing the Key Competencies: A curriculum design deck is useful for this. In developing a hunch we look at our own practices attached to any challenge/s.

This work might look something like this:

stthomastlif_june27recap

Diagram: Fionna Wright – CORE Education, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

When working collectively through the inquiry phases we should discover overarching themes, for example:

“Our learners are engaged in learning activities outside of school and are far more engaged at school when learning is personally meaningful to them.”

The challenge for us therefore is to design learning activities that are more meaningful for students with a diverse range of cultural backgrounds, interests and learning needs. (The creation of User stories to support this thinking is another useful agile approach but this will need to wait for another blog).

So, what do we need to learn and how will we take action, and check that we are making enough of a difference for our students?

Using sprints to manage, improve and innovate on practice in a collaborative, structured, iterative way; whilst collecting relevant evidence to measure the impact of our ideas and actions, helps us figure out what to learn and the necessary actions to take in an adaptive way. It helps us therefore to develop adaptive expertise–the ability to apply new knowledge ideas and skills flexibly and creatively. (Dumont, Istance and Benavides 2010, 3).

This is the approach that Agile Schools has taken with a range of activities in their Learning Sprints toolkit. Amongst these in their Define phase is Boulder, Pebble, Sand. This activity allows us to break down our learner challenge into bite-sized chunks of practice that we can then review, transfer and adapt new learning and ideas before going into another sprint.

It is important to note that, whilst I believe the outline of this activity is useful, I would lean more towards ‘doing with’ students and possibly whānau in identifying and developing learning outcomes. That is to say, if our challenge is to design learning activities that are more meaningful for students with a diverse range of cultural backgrounds, interests and learning needs, it would seem to be reasonable to co-design learning outcomes and activities with the students rather than for them. I also wonder if we should change the language from ‘learning outcome’ to ‘student-valued outcome’. This places more emphasis on designing a response to challenges or opportunities around the nature of learning and the key competencies in the NZC. It also supports the design and implementation of learning experiences that are more human-centred. The Guide to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is useful for this.

Reviewing a sprint

The review of a sprint can look a little bit like a SCRUM meeting in which teams review the evidence collected during the last sprint. Using the Learning Sprints Check-in Tool teams ask questions like:

  1. What learner progress did we see?
  2. What did we learn?
  3. What worked well?
  4. What didn’t work well?
  5. Where to next?

Recording individual ideas on post-it notes to move around and look for patterns, positives, needs and gaps is helpful when answering questions. For example:

fionna-sprints

Images: Fionna Wright – CORE Education, (CC BY-NC 4.0)

This process leads to a collective, in-depth examination of practice that supports the transfer of new learning and consideration of next steps.

So, if the concept of breaking down large, often long-term challenges into a small, structured, incremental steps appeals to you, then sprints might be a process that is worth considering. I’m in my early days of exploring this approach but I believe that, in education, sprints can:

  • support collaboration and innovation
  • provide a clear, simple process that is easy to manage
  • promote rich discussion and deeper learning
  • allow for flexibility, adaptability and innovation
  • encourage evidence-based practice and provide accountability
  • provide structure to more effectively measure the impact of actions
  • inform future practice.

As an aside, a useful consequence of implementing an ongoing sprint process is the development of a growing portfolio of robust evidence that reflects the Code of Professional Responsibility and Standards for the Teaching Profession (NZ Teaching Council).

If a sprint approach to managing challenging change can help us to continuously measure, adapt and improve our practice, it would be great to consider how it could also be used with our students.

Featured image by Will H McMahan on Unsplash

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Quite simply included…

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Fionna Wright

I have been considering the idea of inclusion a lot recently, so when asked to write a post, I decided to write on the subject with reference to someone else’s life, thoughts, ideas and research. However, I changed my mind and then my post, because I know a thing or two about inclusion.

So here goes…

Young FionnaThis is my story.

What I've come to realise is that inclusion, or lack of it, has had a huge impact on my way of being and on whom I have become.

Before sixteen, I was going to be whatever I wanted to be. My future was an open book.  Things were easy for me. Good at school, good at sports,  good at making friends. I was a fairly ‘normal’ teenager with little care for any possible struggles amongst some of my peers. I was too busy making my own way. Being popular. Doing well. Becoming something. Inclusion wasn’t a consideration. I was able to participate easily and naturally in anything I put my mind to. The path I was on was clear of any foreseeable barriers. I was quite simply included, quite simply.

 

This was the person I was.

At sixteen, I had a berry aneurysm (stroke) that paralysed the left side of my body. I lost the use of my left side, my hair, my boyfriend, my schooling, my clarity of thought, my identity and my way of becoming.Fionna in wheelchair I stopped being quite simply included and became someone completely different in the matter of minutes and then years.

This event created a new pathway that led towards the person I was to be.

I quickly became good at other things, like re-learning how to stand, walk, use my left side and be what I perceived as ‘normal’ again. Not ‘disabled’, but ‘able’ to participate. To be included. Certainly not different.

Actually, I was very different. Because my left side was and still is partially paralysed. And it wasn’t just the physical difference that made me different. My entire demeanor, my personality, my outlook, essentially most things about me had changed. But I was still determined to participate in everything. I had big ambitions and I knew what it was like to be quite simply included. I wasn’t going to miss out on a thing.

However, I also learned how to assimilate. I deflected. I disguised. I tried my best to blend in and make myself invisible so people wouldn’t notice anything different about me. Any attention might have made me stand out for what I thought were all the wrong reasons and therefore leave me vulnerable to rejection and criticism. It might make me different. I think a lot of this anxiety stemmed from the fear of being labelled, because in the 1980s, if you were ‘differently-abled’, you were possibly called ‘a cripple’, ‘handicapped’, or at the very best, ‘disabled’. I felt that any label would have a negative impact on my capacity to achieve, or become, or simply be.

This terrified me.

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More upgrade, less cost, less waste?

Posted on June 19, 2014 by Fionna Wright

Life Companion

Smartphone evolution is moving at a phenomenal pace.

Our demand for this new technology is also growing. Some statistics on the Internet show that the average lifespan of a mobile phone in the US is only 18 months. After all, emerging technologies are at our fingertips. We live in a world where technology is evolving rapidly and it seems something new and improved is released every few months.

Take the iPhone for example, after its initial release in 2007, this smartphone is already in its sixth generation of evolution. The latest smartphones have better camera quality, more storage and longer battery power. They have greater functionality to allow users to more easily consume and create content, as well as connect with other people in more accessible ways. The constant upgrading of technology seems to both meet and feed consumer demand for the ’next best thing’.

The latest iPhone, the iPhone 5s is “…not just what’s next. But what should be next” and Samsung recently released the Galaxy S4, marketed as a ‘Life Companion’ to “make your life simpler, richer and more fun”. So, not only are we buying smartphones that are more water and dust resistant than ever before, we are also purchasing ‘friendship’ and something that will make our lives better.

Wow! Who wouldn’t want that!

However, as soon as we’ve purchased the latest life changing mobile handset, something new pops its head around the corner that promises to make our lives even more fulfilling. As compelling as this allure for instant companionship and a better life is, upgrading a smartphone can be an expensive exercise. Both in terms of personal spending and the cost to our environment.

Used electronics is one of the fastest growing waste sources in the world.

Most of our discarded smartphones end up in landfill and not many actually get recycled. Those that do usually go to developing countries for recycling and many of these existing smartphones can be difficult to repair and recycle, leading to sometimes dangerous recycling practices. Nevertheless, bits and pieces from some of these phones are sold into the commodities market to be reused into something else. Otherwise, phones still deemed fit for use can be refurbished and sold back into a thriving secondary market. Both options are better than e-waste going into landfill. However, our growing consumption of mobile technology and the by-product that becomes e-waste, is now excessive. According to Gartner (2013) “Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 455.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013”. That’s a lot of phones! And as a consequence, a lot of waste…

So, what if there was an affordable phone worth keeping? One that we could repair easily and upgrade with less cost and less waste?

A number of people and organisations are currently working on ideas for the next best smartphone, to address both the growing environmental issue of e-waste and the cost of upgrading entire mobile units. Many companies are also increasingly developing technologies with the principles of ‘Designing For Recycling’ (DFR) in mind.

Google recently launched Project Ara that aims to develop a free open hardware platform for creating highly module smartphones.  The project’s Module Developers kit gives developers around the world an opportunity to contribute ideas to the modular design. The intention is that the phone is basically a skeleton that a user can customise with modules based on personal requirements.  If one module needs replacing, simply replace or upgrade with another module without impacting on any of the other phone’s components.

Tablets

Google is said to be working collaboratively with Dutch designer Dave Hakkens on his Phonebloks idea which is similar in concept: 

 

Another player in the smartphone market, ZTE, is also prototyping a modular smartphone that allows users to easily upgrade their hardware.

So are we heading for a future where we replace and upgrade functions, not phones? Where we custom build our devices with lego-like pieces and save on cost and create less waste? Will our schools and students be able to create personalised functionality quickly, easily, and with less money, so that when learning requirements change we are able to match our devices to be fit for purpose?

It’s an exciting prospect. Let’s wait and see.

 

More information on Project Ara here:
http://time.com/10115/google-project-ara-modular-smartphone/#

References:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Samsung_GALAXY_S4_(White_frost).jpg

(2013). Average Life of US Mobile Phone is 18 Months – AppNewser. Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/33775_b33775.

(2013). Apple – iPhone 5s. Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://www.apple.com/nz/iphone-5s/.

(2013). Samsung GALAXY S4 Smart Phone GT-I9505ZKANZC GT … Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://www.samsung.com/nz/consumer/mobile-phone/mobile-phone/smartphone/GT-I9505ZKANZC.

(2014). Vangel Shredding and RecyclingElectronic Waste … Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://vangelinc.com/recycling/the-state-of-escrap-recycling.

(2010). Mobile phone recycling – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_recycling.

Jessica Dolcourt (2014). Your smartphone's secret afterlife (Smartphones Unlocked … Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://www.cnet.com/news/your-smartphones-secret-afterlife-smartphones-unlocked/.

(2013). Gartner Says Smartphone Sales Accounted for 55 Percent … Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2623415.

Design for Recycling – Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. Retrieved May 6, 2014, fromhttp://www.isri.org/about-isri/awards/design-for-recycling.

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