As many of you have already read in my previous posts, I received an Ipad for Valentine's Day/Birthday. Therefore, since I received this wonderful tool, I have began a quest to finding applications that help me come up with better lessons. Today, through reading some of the newest articles in Education World, I was introduced to the fact that Google Earth has been given a 5 star rating from users and critics. Therefore, I started to do some research about what I could do with Google Earth in an English classroom and these are some of the stuff I came up with.
- Set the scene for literature
- Show the students where a story takes place, by pointing at the location in the map.
- Show the students the passage or trail that the characters in the story have to travel/ have travelled
- Create postcards comparing places from the past and how they are today.
- Fun ways of students keep track of the different parts of the world where they have read novels from and trying to fill in the whole world map with books written by people from those countries, or books set in those specific countries.
- Show places where authors were born, lived, and died, which can also show all the places they were in in a lifetime (great for teaching Mark Twain).
If you can think of other ways to use Google Earth in the English classroom, or anything that can relate to English, please feel free to add to this post.
Anais,
ReplyDeleteI really like this post. I never though that Google Earth could be used so creatively. I think it would be really neat to follow a character in a realistic novel as they travel from place to place, from chapter to chapter. Making use of this technology is a great way to provide real-life and meaningful ideas that your students can relate to. I believe that a lot of students don't think of novels as a way to express real life, especially in fictional books such as 1984. I believe using Google Earth along with a timeline of events would be and excellent way to make a lesson more interesting.
Anais, this really helps with a student's motivation to read and can also help them visualize the environment in the story or understand distances traveled. Google Earth, although I have never used it, seems very beneficial in the classroom, not only for English classrooms but for other subjects too. One idea that can spur the interest of children is to have them understand the story and relate to it. Then they can imagine themselves as the characters.
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