New Technology and Outdoor Learning (4 of 8): 4 of 8: Bing Maps and Google Earth

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 Events

Bing 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

Comments

[John McLear]

All good examples, good work

[Juliet Robertson]

Hi! I have to suggest a little extension of the Google Earth Ruler. I love this tool, because even as someone as technically naive as myself gets it! If you measure something like the perimeter of a playing field or school boundary, you can have all sorts of interesting comparisons with standard and non-standard measuring units.

My favourite is to challenge children to workout the average armspan within their group or even class. The group then starts in a corner, makes a circle by joining hands and starts "rolling" along the perimeter or boundary. It's a bit like a massive human trundle wheel to measure longer distances. The reason I do this is to integrate teamwork, problem solving and data collection into the fieldwork / ICT activity.

Once this is undertaken, children understand that measurements can be undertaken creatively and this can help us in our quest for accuracy.

[Ollie Bray]

Absolutely! – I also sometimes play on the idea of Smoots by getting children to make up their own measuring unit. Gets us talking about why a ‘cm’ is ‘cm’ in the first place and why a ‘naughtcal mile’ is longer than ‘a mile’. My favorite unit of measurement was ‘Dunbar Grammar School ties’ it was going to take the class ages to measure until the tied them all together!