El Parque Nuez

I guess new things always feel this way, but I think crowdmap is going to transform how my students interact with their city and their new language this year.  Talk about utilizing cognitive surplus to do something worth sharing.  This came on the same day that I found out my students can follow my classroom twitter page via sms, even without a twitter account (they’re under 13).

Those of you who know of ushahidi (recently brought back into consciousness via Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus examples) will remember that it is an open sourced platform for crowd sourcing documentation of various things happening around a city, neighborhood, state, region, country, whatever.  It’s had a wide array of uses, from documenting violence in Uganda to sharing information about Haitian earthquake damage/victims, more can be read about all around the net.

I found out yesterday via Read Write Web about how Ushahidi was trying to make crowdsourcing “easy”.  Previously, ushahidi had to be installed on a server and confingured, something difficult to do for the average user, and even complicated for the more than average if the environment isn’t right.

Now ushahidi is a “hosted” service, much like having a wordpress.com hosted blog would be as compared to installing wordpress on your own server.

I had to try it.  This represents the kind of equity Monika Hardy has been talking about this summer.  This is authentic learning, as well as an impactful use of communication.  And it can be done by any device my students have, a boon for inner city schools.

So I shared this with a few students on facebook and they told me they would be excited to create this map of things in the city they notice or feel are important.  We’ve wanted to make school more authentic and more impactful this year, it looks like we have one tool to do this just in time.

Students will post (via phone, email, or the site) things they see in the city in Spanish, which will then show up on a map on our site (sanluis.crowdmap.com).  The best thing about this for us, being that so few of our students have internet access, is that they can use a mobile phone (or even a landline via googlevoice) to upload information as they walk around the neighborhood or city.

This will not only be used to spur conversation in the classroom, but also to share with other people outside St. Louis how our kids imagine our community.

I’m very excited about this.

I can also see how a history student would use it: post significant places around the city or state and describe what happened there (even pictures of historical markers).

I can also how math students could use it: post examples of fractals in nature and where they occur, or pi, or theorems, etc.

I can also how writing students could use it, post their inspiration for a poem and a short writing via text.

How would you use it?  How would your kids use it?  Is it valuable?

Try crowdmap.com, or comment on our site when we get it past the “test phase”.