Talk:Improving Geography with the Help of Google Earth

Feedback on your course -- Jianwei Zhang 14:38, 25 April 2009 (EDT)

Your lessons are clearly structured and described. Nice progress! There are three issues here for you to consider in refining your design:

(a) curriculum goals/needs: Do you think remembering the names of the capital cities is core and hard content in the high school curriculum? I have limited knowledge about the scope of high school geography, but suggest that you may want to make sure that the efforts are addressing the real challenge with a tool like google earth.

(b) learning design/strategies: Currently you are focusing on using Google Earth to teach very basic skills, i.e., locating. The learning design might be greatly improved by incorporating project-based inquiry focusing on high-order skills/contents (e.g., integrating data about population, climate, economy to compare different cities or give suggestions about their strengths/weaknesses). It will be fine if the information needed is not all provided by google earth as this tool needs to be integrated with other resources in teaching. Using your lesson 3 as an example, currently you list 6 steps for students to walk through, and these steps read very much like a traditional lab worksheet or a software user manual. (I guess it would bore the students if they need to use steps like these to study 50 capitals.) It would be much more engaging and inquiry-based if you could ingrate these tasks into a whole, meaningful project that starts with a driving question that is authentic and meaningful to students. Re-reading the chapter on Project-Based Learning or looking at lesson examples in WISE may hep you in this regard.

(c) Sequencing: Your unit 3 focuses on locating the 50 capital cities, and unit 4 on knowing the names of the cities. I assume that they need to know the names in order to locate. Also, do you really think that a teacher needs two separate units to achieve these two goals? They are also deeply integrated to me. I suggest that you think about focusing one of the units on higher-order skills/concepts.

Re: Feedback on your course -- TLewis 23:31, 9 May 2009 (EDT)

Professor,

I made a number of changes to my mini course including adding the following driving question: “How does the area we live in affect how we live.” I began the course teach student how to use Google Earth but quickly changed direction and show them how to use the program to find information such as unemployment rates (higher order skills/content). To make the course more inquiry-based I centered the course around the fact that high school students will soon be attending college, so this mini course is designed to help them find one that is best for them based upon geographic location and the socioeconomic climate of the area. Once students gather data about the various colleges and states that are considering, To increase critical thinking I asked them to write a paper to defend this decision including their likes/dislikes of the location they are considering and other information such as unemployment rate, quality of life and median household income. I felt that students would be motivated to locate a college as well as find a state that they would enjoy living in. This motivation would help to increase the potential of students wanting to learn more about a particular state and its location. I also reduced the mini course down to 3 units as you suggested.

I hope that this is much better than before, I also want to thank you for all your help over the course of this class.

Have a nice summer,

Todd