For today’s Phun Phriday post, I would like to share with you a delightful video I found on Neatorama. Before you watch, I have this disclaimer: I am certain that Canada is a lovely place, and I’m pretty sure it is not the only spot on the globe that suffers from natural disasters. Also, it might be an interesting strategy for reducing traffic on the road if you insist that every evacuee secures transport for the family fridge before leaving 🙂
You know how it goes. You’re in the 3rd hour of “training your brain” by playing 2048 on your iPhone in the hopes of beating your 11-year-old daughter’s high score, and you suddenly think, “This is a waste of time. Instead, I should make a wall-size map of The World painstakingly pieced together by my very own hands out of 136 sheets of 8 1/2 x 11 paper so my students can have a more global view.”
And so begins a series of follies that can only be truly appreciated by those who voluntarily undertake ridiculously large projects with absolutely no clear idea of the steps needed to achieve them.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, I not only erroneously thought I would make this map within the week, but that my 1st graders would help me piece it together and that we would mark the locations of all of our Twitter friends and country research before the end of the year. Oh, and that we would “augment” the project using Aurasma, so we could scan the map with an iPad and see videos about each country.
Yes, I’m that naïve.
The good news is that I completed the map – after approximately 3 months. The bad news is that I finished it a week after I taught my last class with my GT 1st graders. The good news is that most of them will come back next year as GT 2nd graders. The bad news is that I have no place to store the map – and we are supposed to clear off our walls before we leave for the summer.
I don’t suppose I really have to leave for the summer…
Anyway, perhaps you would like to try this idea yourself just to prove how inept I am at taping together 136 pieces of paper that were not cut as precisely as they should have been. If so, then I would highly recommend that you watch the tutorial from National Geographic on using its MapMaker Kit resources. Some things that are not mentioned in the tutorial are: you might want to print a double-sided copy of each page so you can tape it from the back, you might want to laminate all of the pages before you tape them together (I initially thought I would tape a couple of rows and laminate them, but they did not lay flat enough), and that you should ask some highly energetic and/or amazingly-accurate-at-cutting parent volunteers to do this for you so you are not tempted to stomp all over the continents in frustration when your map refuses to line up.
Or, you could start small, like printing the 1 pager map of the World instead of 136.
But, where’s the fun in that?
By the way, does anyone see the huge typo on this map? Be the first to comment below if you think you know what it is. There is no prize – just the joy of knowing that you found it. And I would like to point out that this was not my mistake. I put all of the pieces together exactly as they printed from the site. I’m not pointing fingers or anything…
UPDATE: Photo Mapo is no longer free (.99) and Tellagami no longer offers the text-to-speech or customization in the free app. You can read more about the Tellagami changes here.
Yesterday I wrote about an app-smashing project my GT 5th graders did, and today I want to present to you one that my GT 1st graders have been working on. They have been researching countries, and recently created Photo Mapo postcards to tell about particular interesting landmarks. Typing is a bit of a laborious process for some of the 1st graders on the iPads, so I let them keep their Photo Mapo descriptions fairly short. However, I wanted them to elaborate a little more. This was the perfect opportunity for them to use Tellagami. With Tellagami, the students were able to choose if they wanted to type or record their own voices. This involved some heavy decision-making for some of the students. On the one hand, they weren’t fond of typing. On the other hand, they loved all of the different accents they could choose for their avatars if they did take the time to type the script! For some of them, that was plenty of motivation 🙂 Others decided they would rather speak for themselves. Once the students created their Tellagami videos, I loaded them up to Aurasma studio. Now, you can scan their Photo Mapo postcards, and see the videos that give a bit more detail. Their parents will be able to view them at home, as well, by scanning the pages with the free Aurasma app. For more ideas on using Augmented Reality in the classroom, check out my Augmented Reality Resource page – to which I just added an amazing lesson from Andy Plemmons using Layar for a 4th Grade Wax Museum.
UPDATE: Photo Mapo is no longer free (.99).
I have a bad habit of downloading apps that look interesting and then forgetting to try them. Photo Mapo is a free iOS app that should not be overlooked.
Photo Mapo allows you to integrate any photo with a map and short description. It offers 13 different styles, and you can determine what shows on your “postcard”, such as the zoom level of the map, the date, or the latitude and longitude. To choose the map to go with your picture from your camera roll, you can have Photo Mapo determine the actual location where the picture was taken, or you can type in your own address.
To create the sample above, I used a Creative Commons image that I saved to my camera roll from Wikipedia, then I typed in “Rome, Italy” for the address, and wrote a short description.
How can this be used in the classroom?
I’m sure my creative readers can think of even more ideas! Please add them to the comments below!
UPDATE: Here is a link to an augmented reality project my students did using Photo Mapo.
It’s Friday. And we’re going to have fun! Since it’s all about Lego these days (all of my students are talking about the newly released Lego Movie), I thought I’d share some of the Lego links I’ve been collecting lately for today’s Phun Phriday post:
I hope at least one or two of these are new to you! Have a great weekend!
You may remember a post I did last week on using Twitter with younger students, based on a presentation by Matt Gomez about his Kindergarten class’ experience with “Twitter Friends.” I couldn’t wait to try connect my 1st graders with a class on Twitter, and was thrilled to receive a reply to my request for 1st gradeTwitter buddies from a teacher in Illinois.
We decided to do a Mystery Chat – similar to a Mystery Skype. Our students came up with names for the private accounts we set up (that was an interesting brainstorming session!), and we scheduled the chat for yesterday morning.
Before the chat, my class came up with some questions to ask to help them determine where the other class was located. I also set them up with some iPads and laptops to practice looking at some maps and Googling some basic questions.
The experience was not without its hiccups. Map questions seemed to be okay, but we haven’t done a lot of internet research yet. So, when the mystery class asked us what our state food is, we all looked at each other with wide eyes. To help the class out, I typed “state food of Texas” into Google in a separate window from our chat, and we had an interesting discussion on not going with the first piece of information you find on a Google search. I was pretty sure our state food couldn’t be bread!
After a bit more investigation, we found a few sources that seemed to agree that our state food is chili.
With little time left, the 1st graders did not have time to try to Google which state has the violet as its state flower, a clue which our mystery class had given us. They are still hunting and pecking on the keyboard, so I typed it in for them, and found out that our mystery state was in Illinois.
I was a bit worried about the lag time between responses and questions, and was concerned the students would find the experience a bit boring. But, by the end of the period, they were on the edges of their seats. When they found out the state touched the Great Lakes, they immediately honed in on Michigan. When we finally learned the true location, it seemed to mystify them.
“Illinois?!!!! Who would have guessed Illinois?”
Later in the day, I saw one of my first graders in the bus line, and she ran to hug me. “I still can’t believe they live in Illinois!!!!!” she exclaimed.
They are looking forward to our next chat with the Illinois class, and we are hoping to connect with more classes around the world. If you missed my updates to the post about Twitter for younger students, you might want to take a look, as it includes a great resource for finding classes interested in connecting on Twitter in other regions.
