Educational Technology for the Classroom - Google Earth
This week in EDUC 109/261, we've been tasked to research technology that might be useful in our content area, specifically looking for ways to help students reflect and to make abstract content more concrete or experiential. We're looking at this to meet the course standards 6 (CLT) and 7 (DLT).
Standard 6: Uses educational technology to promote student thinking/reflection to clarify students' conceptual understanding.
Standard 6: Uses educational technology to promote student thinking/reflection to clarify students' conceptual understanding.
Standard 7: Uses educational technology to make abstract content more accessible to students.
I looked at many technologies, but kept coming back to Google Earth, simply because it just felt like fun! It's something that I've used in my own personal life when planning trips, thought about moving, and wanted to see what a place was like that I had heard about on the news. Google Earth is a free technology that uses satellite imagery to zoom in on any place on the planet. I immediately thought of a couple of ways to implement the technology in the classroom to make content accessible:
I looked at many technologies, but kept coming back to Google Earth, simply because it just felt like fun! It's something that I've used in my own personal life when planning trips, thought about moving, and wanted to see what a place was like that I had heard about on the news. Google Earth is a free technology that uses satellite imagery to zoom in on any place on the planet. I immediately thought of a couple of ways to implement the technology in the classroom to make content accessible:
- Using it to give a brief overview and tour of a place that we were going to on a field trip. Rational: to help students know what to expect, what they may want to bring, what they might want to seek out and learn about while they're there.
- Before a lesson or beginning a reading, exploring settings and specific locations. Rational: to provide a concrete visual to enhance their understanding and imagination of the topic, increase students' global awareness beyond their local community.
After digging in more with Google Earth, I realized just how many features it contains, and it's possible uses in an elementary classroom:
- Explore both natural and political maps
- Learn about map reading/navigation
- Explore historical, news, and census data
- Create trips/itineraries
- Learn about specific points-of-interest via Google's "Knowledge Cards"
- Download geo-referenced materials created by others (i.e. - photos people have tagged with that location)
- Use Google's "Voyager Stories" feature to explore adventures such as a safari, mountain climbing, a visit to an underwater marine lab, etc. Voyager Stories are created by the likes of PBS Learning Media.
I love that this is free, and so much more interactive than just looking at regular pictures or maps would be. Users are 100% hands-on with this technology, which helps them to explore at their will or with a goal in mind. All this to say, it's also fun. In class this week, we talked about not using technology just for the sake of using technology. There's a risk in being engaged with the tech more so than the content, but I do not think that's the case here. Students can hone in on the learning that the teacher has directed, and reflect on this learning with a broadened point-of-view.
With Google Earth's technology, barriers such as money, access, time, and distance are eliminated from getting students out of the classroom and into the world. It seems to me that application in the classroom is almost endless. I can envision uses in history, geology, history, space (Earth's rotation), mathematics (measurement, distance, perimeter, etc.), social studies/current events.
I love your post, because it points out the many strengths of an amazing tool that I do not take advantage of. I can easily imagine pulling up Machu Picchu on Google Earth to do a virtual field trip in my future Spanish classroom. The geography of Central & South America is something that is pushed in the first 2 years of Spanish, and this would be a great way to make the material more concrete. Instead of just memorizing the capitals of countries, I could use this tool to walk the streets of each capital with the students. All that's left is to find a way to download the food from those countries!!
ReplyDeleteI love this idea! As a corporate trainer, I've actually used Google Earth a few times in my classroom when teaching across locations (I've trained folks in San Antonio and Columbus remotely from Des Moines). I love using Google Earth, because it gives folks in other locations the opportunity to feel like they're experiencing something new with me even though we're hundreds of miles apart. I feel like the same concept can be applied to students; taking a trip through Google Earth is such a fun way for everyone to be engaged in the same moment in a new experience.
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