Sunday, February 5, 2012

Brainstorm on Google educator tools


The school district the instruction will take place will be Sharyland ISD. I will do a lesson and implement it with my own students. I will pass on the idea and lesson to other 6th grade social study teachers in the district. Most of this group is very receptive to new ideas and will jump on an opportunity to use new tools to teach the “forgotten” subject. The technology department is always very helpful and I could always ask if they would like the lesson as a presentation on a professional development day, if it turns out to be good of course. I am currently working with the department for my practicum course for another project and may not want to push to many projects.

I think I want to use Google Earth and Google docs. I already use this tool because of the subject matter that I teach. This will allow the students to use the tool and be able to create a product. I would like to use the tour feature and allow the students to create their own tour. At this point we have covered four of the seven continents and I would use the tool to reinforce concepts we have learned. For example, they can give a tour of several country given specific criteria like different forms of government or landforms. The Google docs can be used for the planning, brainstorming and writing of the scripts they will need for their tour. I considered other tools but most of them are blocked. These two tools are not blocked by our firewalls and it fits in to the subject I currently teach.   

For the scope of the lesson, I believe that Declarative knowledge instruction and/or Instruction leading to Concept learning might be the best to use. First, the tour would require them to know specific names and location of places. So they might need to find the country and capital for several places. They may need to explain, for example, why in Egypt the majority of the population is along the Nile River. These would require them to make connections that would apply to other parts of the world just the same. 

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