I’ve written a new Google Earth based lesson…
The lesson home page is here (or click the picture)
Archive for the 'Google Earth lessons' Category
Not the best week for Geography with the media and Ofsted doing their very best to ignore some of the tremendous progress that has been made over the past year, for example the revisions to the national curriculum, and the Action Plan.
I was cheered up by this example of student work:
click to enlarge
I’ve completed a new Google Earth based lesson which is part of a sequence of activities on surfing and climate change that will be announced later in the year. I’d like to get some feedback on this one though.
The case study is based on the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia
source: Wikipedia
The lesson gets students to create maps of sea level change which are then used to assess the likely impact on the region.
The lesson plan can be found at Juicy Geography: Modelling Sea Level Change
I have written up a new Google Earth teaching idea that combines a study of the modern classic Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, with an investigation of Svalbard, one of the settings for the book. The book is published in the USA as The Golden Compass.
source: Wikipedia
Students act as location-scouts, examining the terrain in Google Earth and adding placemarks to indicate where they would film the various action sequences.
Example outcome:
download Google Earth placemark
The film version of the book entitled The Golden Compass, is in production. There is an official site for the film.
Following a post on my Google Earth blog, I reflected that it would be fun to give students named geographical features and get them to find a representative image which they process using the method described by the Artwork Earth post by S. Fjalar
I put togther a quick example gallery, using the first four terms that came to mind:
I made the above images very quickly using the first four words that sprang to mind. The exercise I envisage is more explicitly geographical than the Artwork Earth images. Elusive images (such as the barchan dune) could be given to students with better spatial understanding, therefore differentiating the exercise. The results could make a really good display, or used as a visual glossary of key terms.
With peer assessment a currently popular trend, I decided to add a twist and get members of the public to vote and comment on some Year 8 work.
It occurred to me that a basic web poll and blog comments would serve to give students useful feedback on their work. The assignment was based around my Google Earth San Francisco lesson. I’ve mentioned before that the ease with which Google Earth placemarks can be created and shared, makes them ideal for assessing spatially located geographical work.
Go here to my new Google Earth blog to find the poll and the students work. Download the work as a Google Earth file, together with the teaching materials, and vote for your favourite. Leaving a comment would provide the students with additional feedback. We would be particularly keen to hear from any residents of San Francisco!
The students and I would be very grateful for all feedback.
I’m upgrading the resource page for my Google Earth lesson “Visualizing a Safer City”
Thanks to Andrew Field whose recommendation of Wink, an excellent free screen capture program, helped me prepare a Flash-based tutorial to the project files that the lesson requires.
Hopefully, more teachers will have a go at this activity, which has been thoroughly tried and tested. “Visualizing a Safer City” offers students the opportunity to understand the principles behind GIS. The visual nature of the activity appeals to all types of learners and the students will appreciate that city planners in San Francisco will be doing an identical task using similar data sets. The task demonstrates the extraordinary potential of applications such as Google Earth to achieve real and meaningful outcomes without the “tech subverting the teach” (to hack a phrase from Ewan Mackintosh thanks to Ollie Bray!)
Get the tutorials, project files, a video and a pdf guide to the resources in one folder.
I have made a short video to introduce the lesson as well as a PDF guide to the teaching resources. These are available free of charge, together with all the other resources on CD ROM or via email. Contact me if you would like them. (A small donation or a free trial of eMusic via this link or just a couple of your own resources would be nice in return)
Recent Comments