Digital Explorer has moved

The Digital Explorer blog has been moved to a new home at www.digitalexplorer.co.uk.

Resources for e-safety in schools

If you are looking to develop more multimedia and online learning in your classroom, but are afraid of the child protection implications amongst other things have a look at these sites for some guidance. It’s an emerging area, so keep in touch with the policies, guidance and procedures that you develop.

• BECTA’s site on e-safety for schools
• the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
• Learning and Teaching in Scotland’s ICT pages
• London Grid for Learning’s safety pages

The automatic veto and shunning of new technologies just creates more distance between the classroom and everyday experience. Careful work is needed to create the balance between innovation and child protection.

Google Maps – blogger vs. wordpress.com

It should have been a great day for educators and expeditions. Google Maps announces that a new function, meaning you can embed a Google Map in your very own website and add points, including video and images.

Above is an example from Digital Explorer’s test blogger site, showing a map of the Atlas Mountains with placemarks added, highlighting Jbel Toubkal and other places.

Sadly, neither of the two free blog services have the perfect solution. If you try to use wordpress.com, WordPress cleans the javascript, meaning you can’t see the map. If you use blogger, you lose all the flexibility of pages vs posts. A wordpress blog could have it’s homepage set simply to a map page.

It would radically simplify web communications for expeditions and fieldwork.

When a decent solution does appear, I will let you all know.

For now:

1. if you use blogger – you’re fine, but bug the blogger support people to have posts and pages like wordpress.com
2. if you use wordpress.com – you’re up the creek until the powers that be make changes – lobby them!!
3. if you host your wordpress blog yourself, there are some plug-ins that will help out – the best one is at the Remote Sensing Tools blog and does not require any messing around with APIs and the like

Good luck, and let me know if there are any neater solutions out there.

Climbing a mountain for a better world – sponsor me!

I am off to the Atlas Mountains tomorrow to climb the highest mountain in North Africa. I am raising money for Offscreen to help create better understanding between young people in the Middle East and the UK.

The funds will help us to involve more countries in the Middle East in our work and roll out our workshops programme to more schools in the UK.

How can you help?

We are raising funds online (click here) and please forward this email far and wide.

The Offscreen Education Programme is expanding rapidly and we want to reach far more young people in the UK and Middle East, so that they can develop proper understanding away from the flurry of negative and stereo-typed news headlines.

Click here to see the work we did in Oman and the UAE.

The video still makes me a bit teary.

So many thank you’s and salaams!

Something that would be blocked in schools…

Further to my comments below about the barriers to using any facet of web 2.0 in the classroom, I was pointed to this inspiring video from the Born Free Foundation. If you were in most schools in the UK, you wouldn’t be able to watch this video. It would be blocked because it is hosted on a media-sharing site.

Christian, the lion, was released into the wild, having been raised by keepers at the Born Free Foundation. After a year, they go back to the area where they released him, and called his name. Watch the video to see what happened next…

Why are schools so afraid of web 2.0?

Something that has been bugging me for a long time is the inability of forming any educational programme that involves social networking tools such as YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, blogging tools or most other web 2.0 tools and sites in a formal educational context.

Young people are using these outside of school and then have to “power down” as soon as they enter the school gates. This experience is well described in a Guardian article ‘In class, I have to power down’.

Who are the blockers? Who is holding back young people accessing the social web for positive means in schools?

Services such as rafi.ki replicate MySpace or Bebo type communities in a better moderated environment, thus allaying some child protection concerns. The Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre is doing good work, especially with the Thinkuknow campaign for young people.

The real losers are going to be young people. Organisations looking to create positive educational materials and projects for pupils will be held back as the most attractive and cheapest web communications methods are banned from the classroom, leaving fashion, music, gaming and trends to dominate pupils’ online time.

Wouldn’t it be great, if teachers could create meaningful multimedia blogs about projects and educational visits in the UK and overseas and use the open source and free web technologies available to engage young people in creating a better world?

Any answers or suggestion greatfully received!

Google launches ‘My Maps’

Google Maps is now much more than a search tool, or a great application for developers to create mash-ups. Digital Explorer created a map of the Middle East with geo-located video for the recent Offscreen Student Expedition.

It is now possible for anyone to create their own Google Map, using ‘My Maps’ and link to this from their own website. Have a play around and see what you come up with. There is an amazing amount of content which you can add to your own map. When you have clicked on the ‘My Maps’ tab, just click ‘Add content’.

The other exciting feature of Google Maps versus Google Earth, is that Maps now supports a html editor, meaning that you can embed video, extremely easily.

How can ‘world changing’ organisations harness the social web?

Preparing for a talk at Earthwatch, I had a look at their Myspace site. Earthwatch has 132 friends. In comparison Lily Allen is listed as having 405,900 friends on Myspace.

What can we do to help ‘world changing’ organisations such as Earthwatch harness the developments in the social web? Or is it a deeper issue of making saving the world ‘cool’ or as the teenager might say ‘sick’, ‘chung’, ‘buff’ or ‘nang’?

Free Google Earth courses

Digital Explorer will be running ten free Google Earth courses for key influencers of geography teaching in LEA maintained schools. The courses will be taking place from October 2007 to March 2008. The courses are kindly sponsored by Google.

Click here for more information and booking

Adding field data to Google Earth

I am very excited, having found a great little programme developed by R. Sgrillo of the Cocoa Research Center in Ilheus, Bahia, Brasil.

We are currently developing a course that will demonstrate how to use this and other tools to build Google Earth into a useful platform for communicating field data.

The GE-Graph tool is fantastic and can be downloaded from: www.sgrillo.net/googleearth/.

Below is an example of the images you can create: