What can 12 year olds do with Google Sketchup

This, that's what they can do. Ian in Islay is clearly a great teacher but has exceptional talent as an ICT coordinator (or whatever his equivalent is in his school), working to get the best in terms of hardware, software, open source, training and pedagogy into and out of his high school (population just over 250).

This is the kind of activity that I'd like to see more schools not just doing, but, as Ian has done, sharing on the web. It sets the benchmark high, and these kids deserve every bit of positivity you can leave them before they head off on holiday this Friday!

Video: Islay House Square in Sketchup

Comments

[Terinea Weblog]

Ewan a good example for the argument that teaching kids how to use Microsoft Office isn't IT, not in this day and age. One of our Architects clients use Google Sketchup, so real transferable skills!
Jamie

[Keith Hamon]

Ewan,

Thanks for the fine example of what children can do if we let them have the tools for learning. This will certainly be in the classrooms of my teachers this coming year.

I've just returned from NECC 2007 in Atlanta, GA, USA, and saw many marvelous uses for Google Earth. Open up the gates.

[Brian D.]

I have to say thay 99% of our pupils love to use google sketchup. The online tutorials are great and quickly allow pupils to go onto more exciting designs.

We recently used google sketch to recreate a virtual St Magnus Cathedral for a cross curricular project we were doing with 13 year olds.

cheers fa sunny Orkney.

[Ian Stuart]

Ewan
thank you for your kind words - I think you may be onto Beer 9.0 after that one.

Brian D
How would you like to try and develop some collaborative work? Island schools working togeather.

[Brian D.]

Hi all

I am getting my S1 S2 pupils to bring movie clips (stored on camera phones, pen drives, WR CD's etc) of activities, sports, and interests that they are involved in out with school which clearly demonstrate new learning/skills. e.g. sport, music, drama, volunteer work etc. I have got a really good response to this from our pupils as they love working with live media and digital editing. I want my pupils to know that as a school we acknowledge these personal achievements just as much as we celebrate success in the work they do in school time.
However due to the incredible range of movie capturing devices out there to-day I have a real problem with data formats that Movie Maker doesn’t recognise. For example my department bought a JVC video camera that stores the video in a default MOD format( a form of MPEG) which is recognisable in imovie but not in Movie Maker!!!! (we us PC’s)
Question…… does anyone know of a ‘Free’ media convertor that will convert movie clips to MPG or is there a ‘Free’ movie maker/editor program out there that can cope better than MovieMaker with the huge range of movie file formats?

Podcasts/videocasts.

My EA block the download of MPG’s, thus we can’t download podcast/videocasts until I discovered http://www.jellycast.com/
For a one off fee of £10.00 you get a gigs of storage space to upload audio and video clips. Make sure you save you video clips as mpg4’s. You can them hear/view your podcast/videocast by putting a link from you blog pages to you jellycast address.

For an example go to one of my blogs http://orkland.edublogs.org and click on the jellycast links.

[Ewan McIntosh]

I've not tried with the MOD format you mentioned, but jumpcut.com offers a nice way to edit video à la Mac but online. And that, I guess, depends on your connection speeds in school.