Map Google Photos

Google photos has added a great new feature that allows the search of stored photos based on where these photos were taken. It takes a while to roll out this feature to all Photos users so you may not have access at this time.

Photos allows a search of your photos by location (assuming you have the GPS location to be saved as part of the EXIF data). Storing GPS locations can usually be allowed when taking photos with a phone. To find photos by location a Photos user should click on the search icon which offers multiple ways to search your collection. The map feature is enclosed in the red square in the following image.

Heat map

Selecting “explore map” offers a map of the world with the areas associated with photos you have taken heat mapped. For the following demo, I have manipulated the map to center on southern Africa.

I can use the composite display in multiple ways. I can select a dot to reveal the photos taken at the location or I can select a photo to find the location. Many of the photos here were not taken with my phone. However, Google photos are also organized by date so that if I have taken any photos with my phone on a given day, the photos taken with the phone will be linked to the map and the other photos taken on the same day will be available in the collection for that day.

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Computational animated demos

Computational thinking proposes that the skills exercised by experienced programmers can be applied (transfer) in other areas. This value added argument for k12 coding experiences is in my opinion unproven, but others see coding for all as a way to develop a different type of higher order thinking. This animated 9 part series from TED-ED demonstrates the application of coding concepts – e.g., variable, conditional, recursion.

Think like a coder

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Achievement during pandemic

I have been wondering if anyone would find a way to evaluate student learning during the pandemic. Obviously, this was an emergency situation with schools having little time to prepare and access from home was inconsistent from family to family. Some schools ended just shutting down early.

I found these data presented in another blog and I thought the approach was quite creative. The data were collected by an organization (Opportunity Insights) who realized that they could access the number of “badges” received by students enrolled in an online math curriculum (Zearn). I am not familiar with this program, but it seems to be an individualized approach used by some schools.

Opportunity insights compared the badges earned over time (before and after students learned at home) broken down by the average income level of families attending multiple schools. The breakdown is by school and not family income. As you can see, there are dramatic differences in achievement.

The blog post I cite offers possible explanations. While these data are important and informative, I don’t find them surprising. I hope this data set ends up published somewhere by the original researchers. One is left to speculate. Are these differences a function of the proportion of students who simply disappeared once everyone learned from home? Would it be possible to determine time on task? What other insights might be provided by educators from these three categories of schools?

These data offer a significant challenge. How might this differentiated be prevented.

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Diigo for layering

Diigo is an online service for social bookmarking. It allows a user to collect links to many online resources and to highlight, annotate, tag these resources. It is social in the sense that as a user you designate your stored bookmarks as public or private and offer the public bookmarks to others in various ways.

I have not thought about social bookmarking systems as a way to layer and then share personal additions to online material, but it just occurred to me that this is the case. Here is what that looks like. I just read and annotated a Forbes article offering suggestions for educators working in a concurrent classroom (students simultaneously FTF and online). I highlighted the article and saved the link as part of my bookmarks. The following is what others would encounter when using the Diigo link to this resource. The free Diigo extension must be installed to see the public annotations of another Diigo user.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tedladd/2020/06/19/optimizing-concurrent-classrooms-teaching-students-in-the-room-and-online-simultaneously/#14bd21923451

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MoocNote for annotating video

MoocNote is a tool (web based or Chrome extension) for adding time-stamping annotations to online video. Educators could use MoocNote to add comments, questions, or links to videos students are assigned to study or could be used by a student to mark spots within a video (with comments) that they might want to quickly identify for reference or study. I am unclear on the MoocNote plans offered to users. There are both a free and premium plan with different capabilities, but the premium version is listed as being in beta (I first used MoocNote several years ago so this seems strange). The following videos describe the setup and application of this service.

MoocNote is an example of what I describe as a layering service. What I mean by this is that the service allows the layering of elements to existing online content without actually modifying the original content. This is important in preserving the expectations of the content creator in that his/her material is still served as expected to users.

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Juneteenth

Looking for Juneteenth resources? Google has a nice collection. For the first time. the Google doodle also recognized Juneteenth.

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