Guerilla Style: Getting technology into the social studies classroom
Working on creating daily class organizers for 6th grade....I'm trying to teach myself Google Earth . My goal is to create a set of class openers that use Google Earth to teach the geography curriculum standards. Not that there won't be the traditional kinds of maps. My district subscribes to Maps 101 and I'm trying to incorporate those.
While my first priority is student learning, I am also trying to teach the teachers. I want them to have this set of bellringers that embed the technology....with the wish that they will find them easy and engaging. Hopefully by having someone create the first set of these, teachers will then be spurred onto trying it. We're working on having a local expert come to teach Intro to Google Earth during our August training induction and again later in October.
I get a few of the beginning steps...how to find places and how to play them as a set of connected places. I thought the best starting place was to have the kids use Google Earth to look at all the schools in our district and then use the measuring tools for calculating distances between them. My hope is that looking at your own school would be the "hook" and pull the kids into the tool. Part of our standards include knowing how to read a map and the directions....if you can measure distances then you can begin to talk about directions as well. I'm pretty much OK through this step in the process...but here begins my new learning curve.
From here I really am struggling. What I need to research and figure out now is how to save them as their own file. Then I have to figure out how to connect these files together (in a Powerpoint????) so that they are easily accessible for teachers and contained in one place. I really don't know if I can do this but I hope to find out. I fought hard to get the technology embedded inside the curriculum standards and now that those requirements are there, I need to deliver the examples. I want social studies to be something that kids "do", not that they read about....and I believe that Web 2.0 apps may be our best bet for doing that.
