Climate lesson using Wallwisher, Google Maps & Linkbun.ch

Year 6 are learning about climates at the moment in preparation for an investigation into microclimates around the school.



Last Friday I set up a new Wallwisher page called Climate and sent out this tweet on Twitter, I also sent messages on Facebook to several friends who live in different countries asking them to help.

What I wanted was for as many people outside of the UK as possible, in as many different climate zones as possible to post their location, temperature, weather conditions and, if possible, a photo. By the time of their Geography lesson on Friday 48 people in locations all around the world had posted their data on the Wallwisher.

I wanted the children to be able to compare the temperature and weather in the different locations, identify where in the world they were and what climate zone they were in. In order to do this they were going to use 4 different websites, Wallwisher, Google Maps (to find the locations), an online conversion website (to convert Fahrenheit into Celsius) and a website which has a map of the world with climate zones mapped in different colours. To make this easier I added the links to the 4 websites to Linkbun.ch , if you haven't seen it Linkbun.ch is a really useful site that lets you put multiple links into one small link, so when you click on the small link it opens all the links at the same time. This was my first time using it after seeing Ian Yorston demonstrating it at one of the TeachMeetTakeover sessions at BETT2010. It made working with multiple websites much easier for the children who just had to click on one link and everything they needed for the lesson opened automatically for them.

At the start of the lesson I explained exactly how I'd got the weather data for this lesson and the children were immediatly interested, curious and eager to start looking at all the information, the fact that many of the people who posted on the Wallwisher are people I know really motivated them and they had lots of questions. The children were really interested in the pictures but unfortunately most of them were hosted on websites which are blocked in school(Flickr, Twitpic etc) so they couldn't access them which was a shame.

At the end of the lesson we talked about what they had learned and apart from the obvious things about weather & climate they talked about many of the features of Google Maps they hadn't explored before (streetview for example), some of the children hadn't known that there was a difference between F and C or which countries used which unit of measurement before, and they also said they learned that "it's not just the British that like to talk about weather", and "Miss Brownsword has a lot of friends who live in funny places"!