Tour Builder for Collaborative Writing

In Room 311, we are taking a journey around the world in search of 10 Mystery locations! (See Journey North Mystery Class Project.) On our journey, we are discovering so much about latitude and longitude and using tools such as My Maps and Tour Builder.

As we worked on latitude, we wrote a class story about the stops we would make if we strapped on a new invention called Latitude Shoes. What would it be like to travel around the world at our latitude in 24 hours? What would we see?

Each team of students explored and wrote about a location on or near 33 degrees latitude. A couple teams took side journeys a bit off the approximate latitude, but they enjoyed exploring the world and writing their piece of the story.

Check out our story on Tour Builder. Click Here
(The tour is best viewed in 3D with a browser with Google Earth installed.)

A preview:

Expert Help: Alice Keeler on Google Sheets: Creating a Line Graph

My class has done the Journey North Mystery Class Project for several years. It's a year long project that takes us through tracking daylight and observing changes to using geographical clues. We will be looking for 10 Mystery Classes located somewhere around the world.
So far, we've always graphed the data on paper and posted them in the classroom. We will still work on that, but I wanted a way the kids could see the data online so they could refer back to it, talk about what it means, and make predictions. I was stuck because I couldn't get the data into a line graph in Google Sheets or Excel.
One morning I posted the question to Alice Keeler (@AliceKeeler).

She asked a few more questions, I shared the Google Sheet file with her, and was able to watch as she moved things around and made it work! The amazing thing about Google Sheets, or any Google Doc, is the ability to share in real time! She commented right in the file and showed me where I went wrong and how to fix it. Not only do I have a line graph that I had been trying to figure out for several years, but I know how to do it myself the next time!

Click here for the explanation in Alice Keeler's blog. AliceKeeler.com

http://www.alicekeeler.com/teachertech/2015/01/04/google-sheets-creating-a-line-graph/

What's with that clock change thing?

One of the best projects my classes have ever done has been participating in Mystery Class through Journey North. In this global game of hide and seek, the search is on to discover the location of 10 mystery class locations somewhere in the world. Hundreds of classrooms participate in this project ranging from second grade through 12th grade. 
We start prepping for this hunt the first week of school by noting the sunrise and sunset times in our city. How many hours of daylight do we have? Next week, will it be the same, or different? Why is it changing? Each week we look up this data, graph it, talk about it, wonder what it means. We discuss and think about time zones - why is it later when we call grandma on the East Coast? We trace our shadows at differnt times in the day, why are they longer shorter, going this way or that?
In January, we will start getting sunrise and sunset times for the 10 mystery locations. Based on what we've observed in our local area, we will make predictions about where these sites could be. Later we'll get some more data and geographical clues to research, narrow down, and hopefully confirm our guess. We will be right? Even I, the teacher, don't know. But finally the true locations will be revealed. Whether we are right or wrong doesn't matter as much as the quest and learning. But we are usually right ;)
Which brings me to my original question, what's with this time change thing? This week, while charting our daylight hours and the sunrise and sunset times, we noticed something strange. The pattern of change for the daylight stayed the same, we are losing about 13 or 14 minutes of daylight each week - this week about 10 hours and 46 minutes of daylight here. But the graph for the sunrise and sunset times took a big jump to the left. What happened there? Our entire class was able to connect that changing the clocks made our graph have a big change. It didn't change the amount of daylight, we didn't actually add or lose an hour, it just stepped to the left (or moved to the morning.) 
(I forgot to take a photo of our working graph. I'll do that tomorrow and add it here.)