365 Days of Glass - Inspired by #IfKidsHadGlass

A blog to document my use of Google Glass, inspired by suggestions I received from teachers and kids around the world. #IfKidsHadGlass #GlassExplorers #GlassEdExplorers

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365 Days of Glass - Day 162

During a recent 2nd grade field trip, students used Glass to document their experience visiting a traditional Lenape village. They were able to record their first-person perspective trying to carve and shape wood into a canoe (above), create cordage or rope, make fire, and other traditional activities. 

What I think is really neat about capturing this perspective is that their families can really experience what the field trip was like and engage in deeper discussions with students about them. It also makes it much easier to share with global partners because other students can see from the perspective of a student, what she or he did and learned. I wonder what kind of virtual library schools could create if students always took Glass on field trips and added their documentation to a central library? 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 161

In September, I traveled to Manila to be a speaker at the Learning2 Asia conference. I brought Glass and used it to record photos and videos while riding a bamboo bike and touring Intramuros. It was amazing to be able to capture so many of the sights and my different experiences while riding a bike through the city. 

When you’re traveling, the ability to be fully engaged in an experience and still record it for your “memory book” is really valuable. It was also a neat way to show students what my trip was like and take them on a virtual “tour” similar to the one I took, since they could view it from the perspective of riding a bike through the streets there. 

Standing with my bamboo bike!

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365 Days of Glass - Day 160

During a four day professional learning institute on design thinking and making that Mary Cantwell, Jim Tiffin, and I hosted at Episcopal Academy, we took everyone on a field trip to the Please Touch Museum. I brought Glass to capture some of our experiences, especially what it might be like to wander through those spaces as a child (since our goal was to rediscover the curiosity of a child). Glass is a really great tool to document experiential learning and different viewpoints. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 159

On Monday, I went with our four second grade classes to visit a local state park. The students have been studying national parks so this was a great opportunity for them to do some exploring and make some observations of nature for science class. 

We brought Glass along so that students could capture some of their first-person experiences of climbing hills, discovering wildlife, and learning about the park. This auto-awesome clip shows a few highlights from the trip! I love that Glass can help us see the world through students’ eyes. I think it would be neat to do a tour of national parks with Glass and recorded/narrated by students.   

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365 Days of Glass - Day 158

The kindergarten students have been documenting the growth of tulips that they planted as part of the Journey North Project. I went to the gardener with one student who had the job or recording observations and reporting back to the class. We captured some documentation with Glass, with a class iPad, and also on paper. When we returned to the classroom, she used her iPad to present her photos and explain what we had seen (some bulbs are starting to sprout and they’re mostly dark red!). 

I wish there was a faster and easier way to share photos from Glass or even Auto Awesome movies like the one above since by the time it was created, school was almost done for the day. Still, aside from the music, I like how the Glass video stitches together a journey of documenting in the garden that could be shared with the students in the class. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 156

The first grade classes have been doing some coding work connected to their current social studies unit about “Who am I?” and “Where am I from?” 

They have been using the Kodable app throughout the year so the students are comfortable looking at a maze and determining which directional codes (up, down, left and right arrows) will help the fuzzFamily robot get to the end of the maze. 

For this project, I created maps (a current topic of study) of the path from their homes to school and helped them turn those paths into structured mazes by layering on a grid helping them color in specific blocks. Next, I brought in some Lego characters so the students would have a tangible object to serve as their “robot” that needed code to get from home to school.

Student immediately realized they would have to use their brains as the “computers” controlling the robots and they filled in their mazes with directional arrows just like they have done on the iPad. Then I challenged them to swap the arrows for “map codes” and use N/S/E/W instead. The students had a chance to trade maps with a partner to check for bugs in their code, like in the video above. 

I used Glass to capture students’ work, both from their perspective and my own, as I did this project. Since it’s a very active, hands-on activity, it helped to have Glass be a simple background tool we could use to document students’ learning and work without obstructing their view with a camera or asking them to pause and hold another device. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 155

Here are some of the highlights from Day 2 of my New York City trip visiting the Blue School and Avenues: The World School. Once again, Glass made documenting our visit seamless, especially at the Avenues, where we were going up and down various floors a lot. 

 I’m excited to share these photos with our faculty and dig into a discussion about flexible spaces and different ways to setup maker/innovation spaces. I think Glass has a lot of potential as a professional development tool because it can help educators easily capture learning experiences, like a school visit, and often even summarize them in an Auto Awesome video without the educator having to take a lot of time afterwards to edit and create a final product. 

Would you use Glass on school visits or at other professional learning opportunities? 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 154

Recently, I had the chance to visit some schools in New York. I brought Google Glass along to document the trip! The goal of the trip was to see how the schools had set up maker and innovation spaces and also how they structured their schedules. 

Glass made it very easy to capture different spaces as we traveled through the different buildings without slowing the tour down or being overly obtrusive. Check out the photos above from Day 1 - visiting the Agile Learning Center, Marymount and Grand Central Tech (a startup accelerator). 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 153

I brought Glass on a winter walk our kindergarteners took in science class. They were focusing on making observations by looking up, down and all around them as they walked. I invited them to use Glass whenever they discovered something that they thought was interesting or wanted to record on their observation sheet. This included the bone above, thorns, a bird nest, deer tracks, feathers, and more! 

I like that Glass allows the kindergarteners to really document their observations from their own point of view to then share with their families and partner classes. Next, the students will put the photos and videos they took into an ebook to read in class and share. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 152 

Using Glass, I was able to document the work our Pre-K class is doing as part of the Do It international art exhibit. They are responding to Yoko Ono's prompt: 

Make a wish, write it down on a piece of paper, fold it up and tie it around a branch of a wish tree. Ask your friend to do the same. Keep wishing, until the branches are covered with wishes.

G+ created an Auto Awesome video of the clips the students and I recorded with Glass while they were working. You can see each part of the process, from sharing their wishes to sketching them out to painting! Soon, we will hang them on a tree to share with the whole school community! 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 151

Our first grade students have been exploring how to measure, use a compass, understand sequence, and give directions, all through their interactions with Dash, a Wonder Workshop robot. I used Glass to help document and capture this work. 

As part of their social studies curriculum, students are studying "Who am I" and expanding that out into "Where am I from? As we discuss their personalities and their different neighborhoods (e.g., suburban, urban, rural), I have integrated our coding work into those concepts. 

I created mazes for small groups of students and assigned each person one of our jobs: Measurer (ruler), Driver (controls Dash), Programmer (writes the code), and Map Maker (records N/S/E/W directionals). Students started by figuring out which direction Dash needed to go in the maze (North, South, East or West) and then measuring each part of the maze. The everyone had to work as a team to help the programmer figure out which code blocks would help the robot travel far enough in each direction. The Driver was kept busy testing the code and letting the programmer know where problems arose. 

The motto for the unit is "Try, try again!" because each piece of their work required a lot of practice and iteration but eventually, each team helped their robot successfully reach the end of the maze! 

The room was a frenzy of activity during our project times so Glass was instrumental in helping me capture moments of discovery and difficulty as students tried to program Dash and do their jobs. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 150 

I invited a class of kindergarten students to use Google Glass to capture their prototyping work as they finished up a design thinking challenge.

Inspired by the Mount Vernon School, the students have been focused on "How might we ... help our gingerbread babies (GBB) feel safe enough to return" after the cookies they made ran away while they were in the oven.

The students discovered some of the needs of the GBB, such as warmth, safety, and community and created houses that they thought would meet their needs. Students used Glass to show how they built their houses, including adding night lights with the help of LEDs. They were very excited to learn how to light up an LED and then be able to place it anywhere in their houses! 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 149

Students in our Pre-K to 2nd grade classes worked together to help make a video that captures the magic of the holiday season at our school. Using Google Glass, they recorded different ways that we celebrate December holidays so we could share our traditions with our partner classes that are spread around the world. 

They did a great job using the videos to explain different traditions the school and different classes have. It was a great opportunity for students to think about how information would sound to another audience and we talked about the value of providing context. For example, instead of jumping into video by talking about an object or decoration, we practiced trying to let the audience know what holiday it was for first.

What holiday tradition would your students capture with Glass?

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365 Days of Glass - Day 148

We recently received Dash and Dot, the Wonder Workshop robots built for young children to use as a way to explore computer programming. I invited a small group of Pre-K and Kindergarten students to use one of the apps connected to Dash so they could program him to be a race car! Students had to draw a path for the robot to follow and recreate an icon-based pattern as an initial exercise in using sequence and pattern recognition. 

They were very excited to see Dash go and it was great to be able to capture their work with the robot #throughglass. I'm looking forward to documenting our work with the robots with Glass since my own and the students' hands will often be busy coding the robots via the iPad or holding the robots. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 147

As the winter weather moves in, we are starting to document what type of precipitation we see in Pennsylvania to share with our global partner classes.

These kindergarten students brought Glass outside to take a few videos while it was snowing for their partners in Singapore. They used Glass to show what snow looks like on the ground and to capture these snowballs from a first-person perspective.

The students started a conversation about the weather earlier in the fall but they have primarily been exchanging messages in writing. Glass allows them to add photos and videos to their descriptions and makes it easier for them to walk around and be active in the snow while they document the weather. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 146

We have been using Glass to help capture how we celebrate different holidays in December at school. The students went on a scavenger hunt around the school looking for decorations and different traditions, like the candy counting contest above, that they could record with Glass to share with their global partner classes. 

Hopefully these student-driven videos and first-person perspectives will help show the various partner classes a little of how our school changes during the holidays. I think this could be a great discussion prompt to talk about how celebrations can look different in different parts of the world and students can think through ideas about whether everyone experiences the same holidays, in the same ways. 

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365 Days of Glass - Day 145

I have been working with the Pre-K class to help create map each students' global connections. The project started with the students researching and then drawing and painting each continent and also their own self-portrait. 

Next, I work with each student to record them telling about a family tradition, so we can put it up next to their portrait as a QR code. Finally, we look up where their families connections, based on ancestry and family traditions, are located on the map and connect a string from their self-portrait to the different locations. 

I have been using Google Glass to document this work to share with their global partner class in Ethiopia and with their families. I have also asked the students to record some videos, like the one above, so we can see the construction of the map from their view point!