Week 5 Reflection 4 - Powerpoint and Google Maps

Running late!!!   Aggghhhhh!!!!  Stupid Australian National Band Championships, and commitments.  Oh well, guess I'll have to wear the penalty.

When looking at the group 3 tools, I had the added advantage of seeing other class member's results, and my wife's professional experience.  Rebekah is the Reliability Engineer at Drayton, an open pit coal mine owned by Anglo American in the heart of the Hunter Valley's horse and wine country.  It is her daily activity to prepare data on equipment usage, repair stats, oil qualities (an indicator used to help prepare for up and coming maintenance disasters).  More often than not, these presentations are aided with a display of some sort.  So - what better resource and reflective tool than a professional?

Before opting for PowerPoint, I had a look at a sample Prezi as designed by classmate Mischa Freeman.  While I could not fault her content, and I admired what the software tried to do, my wife commented that the constant zooming - in her field, anyway - would get annoying or cumbersome.  For me, it was PowerPoint with special transitions.  I don't doubt I could play with it more, but it didn't captivate me as something I needed to understand better.

I wanted to look into PowerPoint because it's a tool that is used often - and sometimes poorly, in my experience.  I sat through 4 days of lecturers trying to present data to us at the Residential School, and they all made it look so painful!!!

But I must say I am glad I looked.  I loved the links to the virtual museums.  So much so, I wanted to have a go.

I decided, after starting, that I'd cheat - I almost covered part of my reflection in the design of the PowerPoint.  What PowerPoint?  THIS PowerPoint!  As you'll see as you run the show, I've covered three levels of PowerPoint usage - each at varying levels of SAMR.

1. Basic Level - Palm Cards for the teacher
2. Secondary Level - Integrated Presentation System.
3. Tertiary Level - Complete Immersion.

Level one is barely a substitution.  Sure beat writing things up, and having something to refer to when presenting to the class is always helpful.  I've seen some samples of this where people just have the title - just as a reminder as to where you're taking the conversation.

Level 2 becomes an augmentation of the traditional teaching tools.  It's a text book, and the old TV on a wheelie trolley with a DVD (or VCR for older people), and instant references to the Internet if needed.  

I personally feel that at these levels, these are teacher-driven tools.  They make TEACHING easier -but do they help learning?  I suppose they could, when you consider the relationships of test and words simultaneously and other theories (see last week's blog) - but still, the power4 is lying with the teacher to use these tools to guide the learning, and not allowing students to explore the content.

Level 3 is the virtual museum level.  It allows for student driven exploration of a digital environment.  The content is still there, but it's delivered in a way that allows for a little bit of independent reaction.  Personally, I feel that this sits on the border of Modification and Re-imagination on the SAMR chart.  In my slide show, the integration comes from the map - you can select your region (click a blue arrow) and the slide show takes you to the relevant pages.  Obviously, you can go back and add more and more content.

I showed my wife my presentation, and while she liked the integration, she stressed a simple point - as a display tool, you need to limit the amount of data on a slide.  Slides, in her experience, work better with accompanying documents.  While I see her viewpoint (and I mentioned that she is one of a small number of women her field, therefore the short precise information is less about effectiveness of PowerPoint, and more about the learning style of males), I think that she is sticking with the substitution and augmentation of the ICT within her workplace.

Give her a few years of new teaching skills to develop her new colleagues, and she'll change her mind - just as she's done within her office to the older workers.  :D

Bonus Reflection - Google Maps in the Classroom

I made a comment last week about trying to integrate the Geocaching map into my Weebly website.  I reflected then that Google would only let me put one pin in.

I was wrong!  Google has a GIS design system!  GIS (Geographical Information Systems) are used to overlay maps with data, or rather:

 ...to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data.

I've worked with GIS software for previous assessment at CQUniversity, where I did a report of integrating real estate trends and census data with school enrollment data to track school populations, looking for trends and predicting the needs of infrastructure and staffing. I proposed that if we monitored school catchment areas for population trends, we'd see in advance the need to adjust staffing, or invest in extra classes; thus limiting the need to put catchment restrictions on school registration.

In the classroom, the ability to modify a map to place your OWN waypoints, census data, trends and other data onto a geographical display could come in handy, especially as a geography and history teacher.  Draw in old borders of ancient realms.  Plot sites of volcanoes and earthquakes.

I said at the time of my GIS course that it could become a powerful tool in the classroom in multiple subjects too - evolution of music genres as each style advanced into the world.

Regardless of how it's used, I stand by my opinion at that time.