StreetView games and historical thinking

Google has always been cool. They’ve got that whole search thing working for them but what I really like are their mapping / spatial tools.

I’ve been in love with Google Earth for years. It truly is a one stop shop for social studies teachers. Multiple layers of data, GoogleLitTrips, 3D buildings, historical imagery, Tour Guides, Google Earth Gallery – just about anything we need, I’m pretty Google Earth can do it.

And StreetView. Personally I think it’s magic. Especially when they use it to buzz down into interiors of buildings and onto famous landmarks.

I recently wrote about a very cool game called Pursued that takes advantage of the StreetView option in Google Earth. There are others.

One game that just came out is called GeoGuessr – same sort of idea as Pursued. You are given access to a StreetView somewhere in the world and using contextual clues, you have to guess where you are at. You are awarded points for how close your guess is to the actual spot.

Tons of geography stuff going on in these sorts of learning activities – absolute vs. relative location, regional differences, cultural differences . . . you get the idea.

Some of the games built into Google Earth or created by others using Google Earth are focused more on fun. Like the Flight Simulator you can find buried inside Google Earth. But all of them help create a sense of place, a mental map of the world, encourage kids to enjoy geography and the questions surrounding the discipline.

You might want to check out some of the other games:

Sat photos, change over time, and a sweet teaching tool

Four things:

• Google Earth.
• Landsat images.
• Change over time.
• Cool tools for instruction.

What do they all have in common?

Psst. I’ll give you a hint. They were approved last month.

That’s right! The new Kansas social studies standards and even some of the Common Core literacy pieces are asking kids to analyze change over time and to evaluate relationships between people and place. And it’s a good thing.

But are there tools floating around that I can use to help kids do that?

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats

I recently ran across a very cool book that seems like a perfect tool for world geography teachers. Pretty sure we could use it in a variety of other content areas (especially economics) but I saw this and my mind went immediately to some cool compare and contrast conversations about world regions.

Titled Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, the book highlights the differences in diet of families from around the world. The book jacket:

On the banks of Mali’s Niger River, Soumana Natomo and his family gather for a communal dinner of millet porridge with tamarind juice. In the USA, the Ronayne-Caven family enjoys corndogs-on-a-stick with a tossed green salad. This age-old practice of sitting down to a family meal is undergoing unprecedented change as rising world affluence and trade, along with the spread of global food conglomerates, transform diets worldwide. In Hungry Planet, the creative team presents a photographic study of families from around the world, revealing what people eat during the course of one week.

Each family’s profile includes a detailed description of their living conditions, food security, and diet.

This is the same guy who wrote the very cool book Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Together the two books could provide weeks, maybe months, of useful lessons.

To get you thinking about possible lesson ideas, take a look at the following examples. Using either the Kansas state standards or you own local curriculum, think about this:

How might you use these images and the basic data included to develop a world geography lesson?

Tip of the Week: MapStory. It’s Wikipedia for Maps

Okay. Not sure if I should be impressed or freaked out by the fact that the founder of MapStory was also one of the original officers of In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel, as we all know, is the venture capital group working to keep the CIA equipped with the latest in information technology.

I’m gonna go with freakishly impressed.

Because MapStory looks like a very handy tool for teachers looking for ways to incorporate high-level discipline specific thinking skills into their geography and history instruction. And I’m sure there’s not any chance of teachers getting caught up in some sort of illegal international information gathering syndicate through MapStory.

Pretty sure.

Yesterday I shared some thoughts about using maps to to help generate great questions related to the Kansas state social studies standards and the Common Core. Part of what I didn’t talk about was the last part:

If it was legal in Kansas, I would marry a map

I love maps.

Seriously love maps. My latest purchase is a 1941 Collier’s World Atlas and Gazetteer. Three hundred and thirty-five pages of maps, statistics, articles, and geographic data. Sweet.

And really, aren’t maps some of the coolest things that history teachers get to mess with? The answer is yup. But I think we sometimes forget how powerful and useful a map can be. Geography and place often is pushed to the side in our history and social studies instruction. Perhaps is because we just don’t have a strong geography background or we don’t think we have the time / resources to focus on it. But we really don’t have an excuse anymore.

The newly approved  Kansas state social studies standards are focused on five Big Ideas. The fifth one?