Creating learning trails - the fun way
June 2007
Kim Thomas
Of the many new developments in
This is where Create-A-Scape comes in. It enables teachers to create mediascapes: collections of sounds and images that are triggered when the user moves into a particular geographical area. Mediascapes are ideal for creating learning trails, where schoolchildren walk around a particular area to discover for themselves its history or geography.
Peter Barrett, Project Manager for the Kings Cross partnership, is also responsible for the
The first chance to put the new
Peter worked with Blessed Sacrament’s Deputy Head Morgan Williams, and CLC colleague Wing Leung, to design a learning trail based on the Primary National Strategy History schemes of work, comparing how the area around Kings Cross looked in Victorian times with how it looks today. The team hoped that the smartphones would enable them to create a more stimulating and interesting learning trail than was possible with traditional methods. “It’s always problematic to do local history, and the children normally go out with lots of paper and clipboards and pens, which are very cumbersome,” says Peter.
The first step was to work out what should go in the trail: “We walked around the trail, and took loads of photos and then thought, ‘What’s the input of the children going to be?’ Although the phones had a little mini keyboard, we didn’t want them stopping and typing; we wanted them to get the whole atmosphere and feeling of the area and to look more than to write, which would hold them up.”
Having mapped out the trail, Peter and the others found some old photographs of the area on the internet, which they saved locally on each of the smartphones. The children’s task was to use the devices to take equivalent photographs of the present-day local area.
On the day, the Year 5 pupils were given a classroom briefing, and then handed the PDAs, each with a single earphone so that they could listen to voice instructions. They worked in pairs to follow the trail, which consisted of about 16 items. As they walked into a particular area, a location-based picture appeared on the smartphone’s screen, accompanied by the instruction.
Peter gives examples of the tasks: “There was a picture of an old Victorian street, and it said ‘Look around you. What can you see that you would see in Victorian times? Take a photograph of it.’ For the next one, they went onto the street and a picture came up of an old cart with a lot of people in it and a horse, and it said, ‘This was a picture of something the Victorians used to move a lot of people around. Take a photograph of something that does that nowadays.’”
In another example, the children walked down the side of the Regent’s Canal, where they were shown a photograph of an old warehouse, now converted to a block of flats, and asked to take a picture of what remained of the warehouse today.
After a packed lunch at the British Museum, the children returned to school for the afternoon session. The team downloaded the photographs the children had taken, as well as the old photographs, onto a shared area on the computer, and the pupils, working in pairs again, were asked to make a PowerPoint presentation of the trail.
What surprised and pleased Peter and his colleagues was the enthusiasm the children showed for the exercise. Asked to produce at least eight PowerPoint slides for their presentations, each pair made between 12 and 14, and showed that they had grasped the point of the exercise by including the old photographs alongside the new photographs.
The formal feedback from the children was equally encouraging: “Not only did they delight in using the phones by themselves, they were chuffed that they were the first people to do a trail this way. Because you don’t have the distraction of the clipboard and a pen, they could take in so much more. One of the questions in the station was about different forms of transport: you should have seen the range they came up with, including bikes and trolleys.”
Not only were the history objectives exceeded, says Peter, but the exercise covered
Peter is now using the Create-A-Scape software with other local schools. At one school, he and the teacher are designing a story for 6 year-olds with English as a second language: “They will go round the trail and complete a sentence, and because the HP devices have got video on them, the other pair will record the others finishing the sentence or carrying on the sentence they’ve been given from the
The software provides a great opportunity for creating stimulating and engaging tasks, says Peter: “What’s exciting for children is that as they walk around the park with the device, the first picture could be a picture of a dragon, and the voice could say, ‘Five thousand years ago a dragon lived in this park. If you look over to that tree, you can find out what he ate’. And they walk over and suddenly a picture of whatever he ate appears, and sound of the dragon roaring comes down. It brings it alive much more.”
Islington CLC has only been using Create-A-Scape for a few months, but the initial success is encouraging. Peter believes that they have only just begun to exploit its potential: “We are fascinated by location aspects. We’re looking at doing it in other curriculum areas like maths. The exciting thing is working with children and getting them creating things. I think the feedback we get from them stimulates your imagination much more than anything you can think of yourself.”