I absolutely love using and training teachers to use Google Earth. Last fall I had the opportunity to attend the Google Geo Teacher’s Institute in Washington, D.C. to learn Google Earth and Google SketchUp from the Google education team and some of the GE developers. I was able to mingle with Jerome Burg who created Google LitTrips which is a great way to bring the geography in our literature to life. We learned how to use HTML code to customize placemarks, how to use the various built-in Google Earth tools and other advanced techniques. In other words, this assignment was right up my alley!

We use Google Earth for a variety of social studies units at Avoca West and recently, the first grade team approached me with the idea to use it for their unit on “Celebrations Around the World.” I decided that this would be a great unit to couple with my final project for EDIM 508. The assignment – To create a media infused that gives students an opportunity to develop respectful and ethical minds. I put the .kmz file together for the team and today during my tech meeting with the first grade teachers, showed them how I created the custom placemarks and had them interact with the .kmz file so they knew how to use it with the students.

This Google Earth tour will compliment the “Respecting Differences” Unit that actually started this week, so this project could not have come at a more perfect time. This Google Earth tour aligns with the unit goals: How are groups of people alike and different? What are similarities and differences among individuals and groups? Students will explore the differences between schools around the world, traditions around the world, different customs, and will culminate with them learning about different traditions via the “Celebrations Around the World Lessons.” They will also complete activities related to each cultural celebration, view Promethean flipcharts that correspond to the lessons and now teachers will be able to make the geographical connections with the Google Earth tour. Feel free to download, modify or use this tour to teach your students about Celebrations Around the World!

Click here to access the .kmz file

Please watch the video below to see how I will continue to develop Howard Gardner’s 5 Minds for the Future in my daily life and career!

5 Minds

Gardner, H. (2007). Five minds for the future. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press.

In Howard Gardner’s book, “Five Minds for the Future,” Gardner writes about the five minds that will be the most essential for future success – the global mind, the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind. Over the past three years we have found the commenting features on students blogs and the commenting feature on our student newspaper to be an authentic and real world way to tap into the respectful and ethical mind while teaching responsible online behavior. Since our students are growing up online, it is our duty as educators to provide them with experiences that will ideally influence the way that they present themselves online now and in the future. When students are able to consistently practice ‘publishing for an audience’ and ‘commenting with care’ in a supervised environment, it strengthens the classroom and school community and teaches life lessons in online ethics and responsibility.

Our teachers use blogging for specific units of study as well as for digital portfolios. Here (scroll to the bottom to see comments) is an example of a respectful exchange between some 4th grade students and a concluding comment from a teacher. This exchange not only shows the author that the commenters actually read her story but gives the author motivation and encouragement. On our student newspaper, we have a letter to the editor form for people to fill out so people can leave comments. Here is the winter archive of comments from our Avoca West student newspaper.

For more information about student blogging, check out the presentation below. Arrow through it to see more examples of commenting!

After years of knowing about Glogster, I finally created my first Glog to outline our last Encore Tech project in  5th grade! I recall one of our middle school social studies teachers using it to create a Vietnam War Glog when I was on the Social Studies committee, and recall being very impressed with how he was able to arrange pictures, media and links to make the content so visually interesting and engaging for students. Glogster is essentially a website that allows you to add graphics, text, images, video, sounds, data and drawings to an online poster board of sorts. When it comes to content creation, this website would give students the ability to demonstrate their understanding of a unit by incorporating various artifacts (digital pictures, videos, links, etc) and adding them to the Glog. I imagine my students would have a lot of fun creating a visual poster using Glogster and can think of two specific units, one in fourth and one in fifth where this would be a neat alternative.

If the students are anything like me, there would have to be some parameters set. I found myself getting easily distracted and then becoming obsessive about the look and feel of my Glog as opposed to being obsessed about the content. With so many options available for customizing the Glog, content would have to be the first project requirement since you have so many choices on how to display the content. Decorations and customizing colors would need to come after all of the required content is in place. I would also want to talk to my students about using similar looking features to make the Glog presentable as opposed to just junking up the page. I spoke with a fellow teacher friend of mine who used Glogster with her middle school students in Science. She agreed with me in saying that she did not set many parameters and instead just assumed the students would be creative and make the wall look good. Many of her students used so many of the stickers and stamps that the Glog just became a cluttered mess and difficult to navigate or figure out what is was actually about. I think that in the case of this type of content creation, a rubric would be needed to guide students with one category being “aesthetics” or “design” of the Glog.

Depending on which subject you are using Glogster for, there are many standards that can be addressed with this type of technology. I help teachers incorporate the ISTE NETS for students into everyday learning and Glogster lends itself to the following NETS:

1. Creativity and Innovation: Students demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop innovative products and processes using technology.

3. Research and Information Fluency: Students apply digital tools to gather, evaluate, and use information.

4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making: Students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources.

Click here to see my first attempt at a Glog!