Digital Geography

I’ve just finished an attempt at a multiple user video conference with legendary edu-blogger Doug Belshaw and South Wales based Tom Biebrach. Over the past few days Tom, Tony Cassidy and I have been thinking about using web cams and video-conferencing creatively in the classroom. We’ve established a few technical points including:

• Google Talk offers good sound quality and simple instant messenging - however you can’t chat with more than one person at a time?
• Festoon is a free download that adds video conferencing facilities to Google Talk but we discovered that the time-delay with more than one user renders it almost useless. Even one to one, the video is very slow. However my connection could be a limiting factor. We also need to test Festoon with Skype.

Festoon - not quite up to the job.

• Windows Live Messenging is great for IM chatting - you can have several people in a conversation. Sound quality is not as good as Google Talk when making an audio call but video is pretty good. There’s no support for multiple users with video though.
• Doug Belshaw poins out that if we were Mac users then iChat would probably be a good alternative, however we’re just not that trendy.

Top Ten uses for a webcam the list so far based on our discussions…

1. Atlas Gloves. Dominate the whole earth with a web cam and a pair of illuminated ping pong balls. The ultimate prospective parents evening diversionary activity. Related post.
2. Getting students to talk about their work. A web cam provides an instant opportunity for students to explain their ideas - giving less literate students an opportunity to shine. See this post about Year 7 students talking about their work to a mobile phone.
3. Students act as on-site reporters for the rest of a class. For example they could report on a hazardous event and the rest of the class then respond in a desicion-making capacity. This would work well as an additional dimension to my Montserrat lesson.
4. Debate a topic with another class / another school? Representatives present their case via the webcam to a panel of judges who rule on the outcome.
5. Use the web cam to illustrate small scale experiments on physical processes for example meanders or waves in a flume tank, erosion in a partly cropped bed of cress to represent deforestation (SLN post by Trebor here) or earthquake shaking effects. Students can add narration via Movie Maker later.
6. Collaborative pojects such as recording the weather simultaneously across the country by pointing the web cam out of the window at a pre-agreed time. See SLN thread started by Tony Cassidy.
7. Opportunities for two classes to work in tandem on a project in a parallel descision-making task. The decisions made by one group could impact another group, for example a coastal management activity. Two classes could work on the same project then submit their ideas to other students for a peer assessment activity. My San Francisco / Google Earth activity would be a good candidate. Students could email each others placemarks, then debate them via the web cam in a video conference.
8. Video-conferencing offers another way for teachers to engage with CPD. Files can be shared instantly.
9. Develop links with a school in another country to explore a different locality. Doug Belshaw was kind enough to provide a link to Global Leap, an organization providing support for educational video conferencing in the UK.
10. Ask questions to expert geographers. Do any Higher Ed institutions offer this facility?

The list has been devised with inputs from Tony Cassidy, Tom Biebrach and Doug Belshaw. Please feel free to add to the list by submitting a comment, or contact me to be invited into our next conference.