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"It's been around for a few years now and had plenty of interest from around the world already, but Mr G Online has only just discovered Maths Maps. From first impressions, I am absolutely blown away by the idea. The brainchild of leading UK educator Tom Barrett, (now based in Australia), Maths Maps uses Google Maps as the launching pad for Maths Investigations. Barrett's vision was for teachers around the world to collaborate on building Maths Maps, examples of some seen in the screenshots on the left. Here is a brief description of how it works from the Maths Maps website. Elevator Pitch Using Google Maps. Maths activities in different places around the world. One location, one maths topic, one map. Activities explained in placemarks in Google Maps. Placemarks geotagged to the maths it refers to. "How wide is this swimming pool?" Teachers to contribute and share ideas. Maps can be used as independent tasks or group activities in class. Maps can be embedded on websites, blogs or wikis. Tasks to be completed by students and recorded online or offline."

"I decided to use the teacher console on Diigo to create groups for each of my classes. I used handouts and tips from Bill Ferriter's Digitally Speaking Wiki to get everything set up and explain to the student how I wanted them to find, annotate, and share resources and information. (I highly recommend Bill's resources. They saved me a ton of time.) The students had used Diigo for research on a project during a previous school year so I thought with Bill's handouts and the boys' previous experience we were in good shape to begin. I soon learned differently. We have a 1:1 laptop classroom and the boys have a natural tendency to head straight to Google any time they have a question, but it was obvious after the first day that they weren't finding the quality resources they needed. Additionally, some boys still didn't know (or forgot) how to share to a group while others didn't know how to write a quality annotation. I had assumed too much. They needed what Mike Kaechele calls a "teacher workshop" on searching for information and on how to use Diigo. They needed me to model what they should do."

"e should be teaching kids not to install malware, rather than locking down machines so that it's physically impossible. We should be teaching kids to stay safe on-line rather than filtering their internet. Google and Facebook give kids money if they manage to find and exploit security vulnerabilities in their systems. In schools we exclude kids for attempting to hack our systems. Is that right?"

I dislike the pyramid because it creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity - only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it's not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students. I think the narrowing pyramid also posits that our students need a lot more focus on factual knowledge than creativity, or analyzing, or evaluating and applying what they've learned. And in a Google-world, it's just not true. Here's what I propose. In the 21st century, we flip Bloom's taxonomy. Rather than starting with knowledge, we start with creating, and eventually discern the knowledge that we need from it. Shelley Wright

Resources for SAMR