Kathy Ho, this week’s Educator of the Week, created an art project focused on the colors of Arctic sea ice. Through this creative activity, students learned about a region of the world that was previously unfamiliar to them. They also considered the impact of climate change on Arctic sea ice and the animals that rely on it. Continue reading Educator Spotlight: Creating a Collage for Geoliteracy
Harbor (HAR-bur) [Physical Geography]Noun. A harbor is a body of water sheltered by natural or artificial barriers. Harbors can provide safe anchorage and permit the transfer of cargo and passengers between ships and the shore. A harbor is deep enough to keep ships from touching bottom and should give ships and boats enough room to turn and pass each other. Most harbors are natural. They … Continue reading Wednesday Word of the Week: Harbor
1. Twitter. Teachers can now use Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, to start dialogues with teachers and students in all parts of the world. A great example of how Twitter is redefining the concept of a global classroom comes from Overton High School teacher Adam Taylor. Adam connects his students with students from all over the world, even making time before regular school hours for his students to converse with their peers from Pakistan across an eleven hour time difference. Adam says, “I can see this project going a long way to helping my students understand different parts of our country and the world. With the right online tools students are not limited to learning from a book or the teacher in the room. The world and the people living on it become the classroom and the teacher.” To learn more about how Adam developed this project, and about his current work as a classroom innovator, check out his blog, 2footgiraffe.
2. Skype. With Skype, teachers can add face value to the cultural conversation. Skype can be implemented into the classroom in a variety of ways, in fact, teachingdegree.org lists 50 awesome ways to use Skype in conjunction with education. In terms of defying the traditional restrictions of place and space, one example from Seth Dickens of DigitaLang reveals how adding interaction over Skype can bridge a cultural gap between students negotiating a language barrier. Seth Dickens’ Italian language class had been using Twitter to practice written conversations with students in Italy learning English. To finish off a great semester of applying social media in the classroom, his students planned a “face-to-face” finale with their Italian peers via Skype. Seth wrote of the event, “overall my students left the classroom with big smiles on their faces after staying behind late (after a hard day of exams). In my book that’s a lesson that has worked well!”
3. Edmodo. Carol J. Carter, expert in student success and transition asks, “Have you ever wished you could connect your students with students across the world? What about provide a once in a lifetime experience to your students without having to leave the classroom?” Carol believes that Edmodo is the answer. A classroom of 5th graders has recently put this new social media platform to the test as they connect with other students around the world. The Quad City Times reports that about two dozen students participating in an Extended Learning Program project are communicating online with students across the country as well as in Canada, Japan, China, India, and Poland in an effort to put together projects about their daily lives and the things that make them different and the same. The students communicate through Edmodo, an online social network designed for teachers and students that is formatted similar to Facebook. The teams are assigned topics for their projects based on an aspect of their everyday lives, such as food, clothing, celebrations, housing, transportation and school.
Continue reading “Five for Friday: Getting a Global Education from Social Media”
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: [physical geography] featuring the Plastiki
Noun: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a collection of marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean. Marine debris is litter that ends up in oceans, seas, and other large bodies of water.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch and the Pacific Trash Vortex, lies in a high-pressure area between the U.S. states of Hawaii and California. This area is in the middle of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
An ocean gyre is a circular ocean current formed by the Earth’s wind patterns and the forces created by the rotation of the planet. The area in the center of a gyre tends to be very calm and stable. The circular motion of the gyre draws in debris. Debris eventually makes its way into the center of the gyre, where it becomes trapped and builds up. A similar garbage patch exists in the Atlantic Ocean, in the North Atlantic Gyre. Read more about The Great Pacific Garbage Patch on our website!
Continue reading “Wednesday Word of the Week: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
Tricorders–The Next Tool for Geographic Learning? 
“Geo Learning”
by Daniel C. Edelson
Vice President for Education
National Geographic Society
If you’re of a certain age, you probably find yourself looking around and remarking on how much today’s world looks like the world that Gene Roddenberry imagined in the original Star Trek series. OK, we don’t have transporters or warp drives. But we do have computers you can talk to, two-way video communications, and devices that work like communicators and tricorders.
There is a lot of discussion these days about what impact these Star Trek technologies might have on education. In just the last couple months, I attended a one-day summit on the promise of wireless technologies for education and a two-day workshop on the use of mobile devices for citizen science.
For geoliteracy, I think these devices offer amazing opportunities to move learning outside the school building, and we’ve been designing software at National Geographic that students will be able to take into the world on handhelds that will enable them to record observations, combine them with observations of others, and analyze them for geospatial patterns. However, an inescapable challenge of learning in the real world is that the real world is complex and unpredictable. Sometimes it is too complex and unpredictable to enable you to be sure that you can teach specific relationships or skills through real-world experiences.
Continue reading “Danny Edelson: Tricorders–The Next Tool for Geographic Learning?”
