This past weekend, I took a workshop on Literature in the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classroom. The concern for the lack of fiction (novels, poetry, short stories, etc.) is not unique to ELA (English Language Arts), and many of the claims made by TESOL theorists apply to English instruction for native speakers. Collie & Slater, Literature in the Language Classroom, note that fiction provides “a rich context in which individual lexical or syntactical items are made more memorable” (5). You want to teach kids to pay attention to language? Make sure that language they're reading is compelling enough to experience and remember it.
I didn't need much convincing. What I wanted to explore, was how to use authentic texts (not written or adapted for specific educational purposes) with struggling readers. For the required group lesson plan, our professor, Dr. Fuchs, added the additional challenge of using technology.
My team member, a working teacher in Manhattan, wanted to focus our lesson on the use of setting in Lord of the Flies. We came up with a number of ideas for activities, where students make maps of the island from the details provided in the story, and make maps of the places most important to them in their own neighborhoods. But how to use tech?
Neither of us had used Google Earth, and I definitely couldn't have predicted how much fun I would have playing with it. The applications to the study of history (watch as the three dimensional landscape of a city changes with a sliding timeline), geography (measure distance and altitudes along user-made paths), social studies, and science. Why follow an RSS feed of astronomy research when daily updates are linked to a 3-D map of the universe?
We decided to have students plot a tour of Ralph first exploring the island, and his introduction to Piggy. We were excited. The tour and path features allow users to manipulate and control how we see the map, essentially making every tour guide a director with a camera and a helicopter. (I will post our example and our lesson plan when we finish revising sometime this week.)
If the teacher restricts the area to somewhere local, as my partner suggested, he can take his students to the sites of their virtual tour. So his class from Washington Heights can visit Inwood Hill Park, find the location where they placed Ralph near the "lagoon," take a picture or video at that location, attach GPS coordinates, and upload their recordings with notes to that coordinate on Google Earth.
It's great. There's a built in audience of global Google Earth users, where tours are easily viewable and searchable in the Earth Gallery. But I wonder if I'm stretching an application too far, when something else may serve the purpose better. Why use a virtual representation of the "real" world to recreate an imagined world?
Google Earth Outreach offers some resources for educators and some lesson plans (here's an example for All Quiet on the Western Front). In ELA lessons, students make a tourist route for important sites in a novel. But this certainly doesn't meet the standards set in the Podcourse reading for an "authentic learning experience": "...it has a purpose and an audience and it connects students to the larger community and world" (citation needed). This lesson has been done before, on paper: "make a travel brochure for Elizabethan London." The students make something no one can actually use, isolated, on the Internet, to the students sitting next to them in the lab, made to be seen, primarily, by the teacher.
I've begun collecting resources, collecting lesson plans, and articles suggesting humanitarian purposes for Google Earth and mapping. (To organize all this, I opened a Delicious account, and dusted off my Diigo account from years ago. I will return to my first attempts at Social Bookmarking in a later post.) It seems Google Earth has the potential to bring awareness to an area (a neighborhood in decline, gentrified, or suffering from the expansion of a University), and the events and changes taking place there. How could this apply to ELA?
(I've posted my list from Diigo. See the previous post)
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