This is number four of eight posts where I discuss some of the things that I talked about at the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor learning Regional EventsBing Maps and
Google Earth have a massive amount of potential to compliment and develop the outdoor learning experience.
I’m
not saying that we should be using virtual worlds like these replace children going outside. Quite the opposite,
I am saying that we should use free resources like this to
compliment the outdoor experience.
There are lots of examples of how these two resources can be used but the ones I mentioned during the
Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events were:
1) Use the real time weather layer in Google Earth of Bing Map Weather App to help encourage children to forecast the weather but also to plan with the children in the build up to your outdoor learning experience.
2) Use the Google Earth Webcam layer or the Bing Maps Webcam App to visit places in advance of your fieldtrip. Or use these layers to visit a place that you are unlikely to be able to visit with a class (eg: Antarctica) and then compare them to a local area that you have visited.
3) Use the Google Earth Ruler tools to measure distance, scale and orientation.
Compare what you measure virtually to something that you have really measured in real life. In the UK Farm field size is a great example of this. Get the children to use Google Earth to measure the field sizes in different countries (eg: they are normally quite surprised when they measure the fields of southern Alberta in Canada) and then in small groups go out and measure a field near the school. Just think about what you can do with all this data.
4) You can also use Google Earth and Bing Maps to show an area that you are going to visit to parents before you actually take a group of children there. I recently did this with the parents of the young people that
I am taking to Alaska this summer. An equally valuable use of this type of resource is to virtually
visit these places after your outdoor experience to help children reflect on their experience and their learning.
5) Finally, along the same sort of theme it is great to use tools like the Bing World Wide Telescope App to compare the stars in the sky that you have seen to the stars in the sky in a different part of the world.
Here is a topical example:
i) Pick a place on the earth
ii) See what the stars would look like above your head and explore the sky
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