Google Earth and Novels

In the March/April issue of Learning and Leading with Technology, there was a great article called Traveling the Novel. Two teachers at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville put together a step-by-step guide to how they use Google Earth to enrich their literature studies in English classes. The article specifically discusses their projects for The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and one on the Iditarod. These seem a lot like Google Earth Lit Trips, but with the added dimension of requiring students to post quotes/photos and other responses directly on the .kmz file. I've sent the teachers an email asking how they evaluate success on the project and I hope to hear back from them. In the meantime, their wiki "Harpeth Hall Uses Google Earth" has links to the Google Earth files they have already created. Incidentally, they also include directions for using Google Earth!
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Google Lit Trips

Yeah, we all talk big about how kids need to stop plagiarizing. The copy and paste mentality is ruining intellectual rights. We don't talk enough about how we, as teachers, need to change our own assignments and evaluation tools so that higher-order analysis isn't optional, but required. This new tool I found today makes that possible. Google Lit Trips is the new book report. It's a "mashup", I think. That's a fancy word that just means more than one tool is combined into a new form. Now, a student can open Google Earth and placemark all the stops the character makes along the way in the book, the birthplaces and homesteads for all the characters, the main event locations. The student leaves a running commentary as the "character" traverses the world, offering potential discussion questions or things to consider. There are a lot created for high school books and not so many for the younger grades, but it's just a matter of time. Now THAT's a book report for 21st Century Learners.