As a seventh grade social studies teacher, a main part of my curriculum is location, topography and physical features of countries around the world. There are multiple benchmarks that deal with spatial properties of locations and population bases. As an educator who wants to create engaging, entertaining and effective lessons for my students, I am looking for alternatives to learning this information out of a book. There are a few reasons that learning this information out of a book is not ideal.
First, as my technology use survey shows, most students are not only proficient with technology, but they use it frequently. This comes in the form of video games, computers, smart phones, and MP3 players. We then ask students to make the transition to textbooks. Reading is passive learning, and not ideal.
Another reason why book learning is not ideal is because books are easily outdated. With political borders and population and other demographics changing rapidly books need to be amended frequently. This is quite costly for schools and it's not feasible to always have up to date books. According to USAToday, schools spent $4.4 Billion on new books in 2006. And while that might seem like cost that only comes around every so many years, it is not. State Standards and Benchmarks have changed many times in Michigan recently, and schools have to meet those changing requirements with new materials. On top of textbook costs are shrinking budgets in Michigan's schools. As schools are forced to trim spending, planned purchases of books have been put on hold in many schools, including my district of Napoleon.
A third problem that occurs when students are learning out of a book is that disabilities, or roadblocks take place. Some students might have difficulty reading or they might need remedial help and standard textbooks do a poor job of meeting these accommodation. In my district of Napoleon, 20% of my seventh graders are not proficient in reading. Statewide, 27% of Michigan students were rated partially proficient, or not proficient. This number is also expected to grow as the state sets higher standards next year.
I plan to address this issue with two great technologies that many people use daily. The first is a SmartBoard which us is becoming more and more common in schools today. The second piece of technology that I will use will be Google Earth and Google Maps. These are both internet technologies that we easily used by many students today.
By projecting these applications onto my smartboard I can manipulate the map to show physical features from all angles. In addition to this, I can use layers to add information to the map. Since layers and KMZ files (which are compresses 2d and 3d map layers) are open source, there are multiple that can be downloaded, edited and created.
This is much better than the standard of using a book for many reasons. First, there is virtually no cost - our school owns a smartboad, and the applications are free. Google Maps and Earth are constantly updated with new information - so there is never a situation where the map is obsolete. Because the image can be viewed on a computer and not in a book, I can create screencasts of the presentation for students to listen to, which helps knock down the roadblocks of disabilities and absences.
When my seventh grade class moves back to Geography (April 14th) I will begin implementing my new plan. I plan on using it in all of my 5 classes which contain about 125 students. This unit will last approximately three weeks, but specific applications of this technology will only be used about 1/3rd of the time.
The real change that will be seen in my curriculum is less work out of the book. By using the smartboard and having students see the physical features and discuss them as a class will have more of an effect than reading silently out of a book.
If successful it will have practical applications throughout the entire year in covering multiple countries and continents, not just one unit. As we approach the end of the year, I would like to use this technology through the rest of my units. At the end of this school year (June) I will reevaluate the technology and how it worked in my classroom. If it is successful and students are engaged and active learnings, I can work on implementing it as a regular part of each unit in the next school year.
I'm excited to start using this technology and there are many sources that I can use to being planning my lessons. There are multiple blogs sponsored by google, and non-google bases blogs written by teachers who use KMZ files and Google Earth. These resources will allow me to create the ideal lesson to meet the learning needs of my students.
Some of these sites are:
http://www.kmzlinks.com/ - Downloadable "flyto" maps for google earth
http://sitescontent.google.com/google-earth-for-educators/classroom-resources - Google Earth in the Classroom
http://www.yourchildlearns.com/owlmouse.htm - Own and Mouse - Interactive Maps
I can't seem to find anyone who has used this product the way that I want to, but I have found accounts of teachers who have used interactive maps on their smartboard. I am sure there are teachers who have used Earth and Maps on their board though.,
There are many ways to judge if this is a successful project or not. The political scientist in me would like to have 1/2 of my class use the book, and have 1/2 the class use the interactive mapping lessons and compare results. I think though that the interactive map will improve test scores and it would be a disservice to those students who have to use the book, because again my goal is to engage all students. What I will probably end up doing is comparing test results from students against their average. If students score higher on the mapping portion of their test compared to their average, and the remainder of the test, I would consider it a success.
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