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Introduction
Introduction
Our instructor was Kyle Brumbaugh. He is the Director, Professional Learning Network for the Krause Center for Innovation, Foothill College. He briefly introduced himself and let us know that no G Suite tool has undergone as much change as Google Maps. His hope was to show us some of the different features of Maps, and later Google Earth.
Google Maps
Google Maps
With Google Maps, many of us have used it to find where something is or more likely, directions on how to get somewhere. Truthfully, that is really all I've used it for, though I stopped for a while. One day, my wife and I were trying to get to Angel Stadium (or whatever it's called these days), and we ended up in some neighborhood where folks were having a cool looking block party...Except it was not the Stadium. Haha.
It was helpful seeing some of the features of map, including walking distance, riding (bikes) distance and even using public transit and being able to see how much it might cost.
Street View is another cool feature that you and students could use. Street view basically allows you to get on the "street" to see what you might see if you were actually there. It uses pictures taken, sometimes by regular folks, so we can see up close what the area looks like. This can be especially useful if you are studying historical points of interest- you can 'see' the place you are studying.
He told us that using latitude and longitude can be accurate up to 1 meter for any given point on Earth. I don't know why I would use that in general, but I know some folks who do geocaching who find that useful.
Google Earth
Google Earth
Teaching 2nd graders, I found that Google Earth would be more beneficial for my students. Just allowing them to explore various places or get familiar where different spots on the map are can be more interesting than the pull down maps of days past.
We also tried it today (the day after the presentation) in class. For our countdown to summer, we do an ABC Days thing, where each day counting down is something fun or new. Yesterday was United States Day and the students used a map online and a physical map found the different states and wrote them in on their maps. Though it was a day late, I let the students explore the US, the state and our city. I gave them almost 30 minutes to explore and try things out. They were very engaged in the activity.
I also showed them another thing the instructor showed us, which was Voyages. Voyages was a way to go on a virtual tour of different places. There were many categories to choose from, including travel, nature and even education.
Students (and teachers guiding the lesson) are able to go on these tours and visit each place. On the side, there are several facts about each place. When you click the next button, you zoom out and relocate to each new place. I think this has some very cool possibilities for the classroom.
One of the difficulties you may have is having too many students on at once; it does seem to have a lot of beautiful graphics that can play havoc with your bandwidth. Definitely worth checking out.
View from voyages
We were also given some resources to some tutorials on how to create your own tour.
Some of the participants in the chat also shared a couple resources. One was Real World Math that has real world math problems lined up with Google Earth. This seemed to be more for the upper elementary and beyond.
Another was Smarty Pins- This was a fun little trivia game where you have to guess where various events in history (recent or further back) happened. Might be a little tough for the littles, but could be fun for upper elementary and up also.
- What did you think was valuable? Why
- As always, I am enjoying the learning of new tips and tricks. Part of the value is being able to take some time (or being forced to) to try out the tool. I enjoyed learning about the Voyages section of Google Earth because anytime I can use something someone else has made, it gives me a stepping off point to trying it in my classroom, instead of trying to create everything on my own.
- What did you NOT think was valuable? Why
- Some of the aspects of Maps and Earth seem interesting, but may be a higher level than I can use with my kiddos. I like the idea of having student doing some of the activities, but it would not work yet. The good thing is, I can still share some of these things with the upper grade teachers.
- Will the discussion change any of your teaching practices? How?
- Considering I have already used Google Earth in my class, I would say yes. I plan on trying a couple other things, like using maps to have students learn about the school and the community, with annotations.
- What do you think is worth sharing with colleagues?
- Google Earth's Voyages for sure.
- What are you inspired to do, think, etc..
- I am inspired to try some of these tools, especially in Social Studies lessons, but I also liked one of the ideas about Lit Trips, which was to go to some of the places you learn about in a book you are reading as a class.
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