#365daysofglass

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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!

[365daysofglass]

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).