Room With A View

A study commissioned by the US Department of Justice is discussed on CBC’s May 1st episode of Search Engine. Some people may be surprised by the study’s findings. It’s well worth a listen but here are a few key points:

• there is not a simple relationship between violent video games and violent behaviour
• boys that don’t play games are more likely to get into trouble at school
• kids like the complexity of games not the violence. It just happens that the violent games tend to be the complex ones.
• kids are acutley aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. They know that games are not real. That’s why they like them.
• youth violence has gone down in the past 15 to 20 years. The reporting of violence has gone up.

Here’s a link to the study’s homepage.

With all the craziness of the last couple of weeks of school it’s been hard to find time to post. This will be brief.

I’ve been playing around a bit more with Google Earth and the grade seven trip to Chengde–China. I’ve now combined the waypoints from my GPS with the photos I took and posted to Flickr. I haven’t done it with all the waypoints as I’m hoping to get some kids to do it but I’ve done a few. [Link]

Here are some quick thoughts on how this might be used at school:

• Fieldtrips: kids combine waypoints, photos, and their writing to do trip summaries
• Fieldguides: students write guidebooks to historical sites (i.e. The Forbidden City). Use GPS so the user can go to the exact spot/artifact to read the information. The next step would be to podcast the information so users can listen to the guide on their iPods/mp3 players.
• Habitat For Humanity: Have kids take GPS units with them when they go out to build houses. They can mark the sites so they can check up on their projects later–perhaps years later.

Back to work!

Our grade seven students spent three days in Chengde last week. I went along and took along my hand held GPS. I used it to mark the places we went and now they can be loaded into Google Earth. Here are the technical details of how I did it.

As I said above I used my GPS to mark some of the places we went. Next I used GPS Babel to download the waypoints to my computer and convert the file to .gpx format which can be read by Google Earth. Next I dragged and dropped the .gpx file onto an open Google Earth window and voila. I could see everything marked on the map. Finally, I uploaded the file to my class wiki so the kids can access it from home.