Here’s the links and resources you’ll need during our 2 days together of getting to know how to use a GPS to find locations, mark locations of your own, and integrating this technology to collect relevant data & create custom maps with your classes.

Here’s a link to my GPS Blog for Education hosted at SEDC, and here is the class agenda. Another useful resource could be the Groundspeak Forum for GPS in Education.

Here are the photos from our class!

Other links and relevant resources, Day 1:

• Link to How Does The GPS System Work presentation and video that you can use with your students
• Geocaching.com - Set up your account
• Finding your first Geocache
• GeoLex - Lexicon of Geocaching
• Geocaches That Teach
• Waypoint Management: GSAK
• St. George Art Walk Multi-Cache Experience (I’ll post the link to the resources once we have done the activity)
• What If….
• Google Earth
• Nine Eight Planets.org

Other links and relevant resources, Day 2:

• Classroom Integration Survey and your responses.
• Garmin Web Updater: Use this software to update the software on your GPS unit to increase accuracy
• CMAP - Community Mapping Workshop
• Earthcaching

Here’s the list of Geocaches near the Woodward Computer Lab:

• Relaxing #1 - I Can Almost See A Blue Bunny, Too: http://coord.info/GCWRW2
• Not For The Vertically Challenged: http://coord.info/GC11D4C
• Squatting Dog: http://coord.info/GC1CXGM

Course information for college credit:

Course Name: GIS & GPS in the Classroom
Department: EDUC
Course: 5575
Section: 150
Instructor: Charlie Roberts

The registration form can be found at:
http://tech.washk12.org/uploads/images/SUU_Registration.pdf

Upon completion of the 2-day course, you’ll need to turn in the following assignment to clint@sedck12.org within 2 weeks (July 10, 2009):

Develop and implement a lesson that incorporates a GPS, Geocaching, or Google Earth mapping activity. You can send me a regular written plan, or you can create one using the UEN Lesson Plan tool. You should complete the following fields in your lesson plan:

• Summary
• Curriculum Tie
• Intended Learning Outcomes
• Instructional Procedures, and Assessment Plan

Include with your lesson plan a reflective paper. In your paper:

• Describe how you used the GPS in the classroom and how the activity benefited your students.
• Evaluate your activity and describe its effectiveness incorporating the GPS as a learning tool.
• Include the state core standard(s) the project is tied to, as well as a description of the critical thinking skill(s) from Bloom’s Taxonomy that your students will use when completing the activity.

Here are the links that were mentioned in the Digital Photography Today & Advanced Photo Editing Techniques workshop in the Woodward Computer lab in St. George. You can download the notes here in .pdf format - but you should click the Read more>> link below for all of the class links, resources, and information.

Read more »

Link: http://tinyurl.com/lpsrdo

This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a new type of search engine called Wolfram Alpha. This new service from the same people that brought you Mathematica bills itself more as a computational engine than just a search engine that has the ultimate (and lofty) goal “to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.”

I looked at Wolfram Alpha when it first came out a month or so ago, ran through some sample searches, and went along my merry way. But after reading this article and heading back to Wolfram Alpha to see what came back when I entered things like “caffeine” or “aspirin” or “derivative of y=3x+2″, not knowing if that last one made any sense at all or not, and I began to catch the vision of how this tool could be an amazing resource for classroom instruction and teaching.

But then I thought that any teacher having seen this tool would potentially make their students turn in all future work and take all future tests with a slate and a piece of charcoal…

Take a look at Wolfram Alpha for yourself. Throw some math, chemistry, or anything that can be potentially calculated or summarized at it, and decide for yourself.

For all of the of the links mentioned in today’s presentation…

Read more »

Today we’ll look at some tools, both old and new, that will help you:

• quickly & easily research topics for class
• narrow down a subject to either find or enrich a topic you are researching
• help you create the bibliography for your references (or sometimes even create them for you!)

Mrs. King has let me know that you all have been researching topics such as child soldiers in Africa and other places, as well as slavery & its effects on human dignity. We’ll use the PIoneer Library and its resources along with other tools like Google’s Wonder Wheel and other Search Features. I’ll also show you how to easily create MLA citations of your search results using Citation Machine. Then, we’ll look at some other resources from Pioneer that are a little more, shall we say, fun like eMedia & Soundzabound.