Technology Expert Module:Google Lit Trips

By: Laura Bagbey

Overview: Google Earth and Google Lit TripsGoogle Earth is a downloadable computer program called a “geobrowser” that allows anyone access to the world’s geographic information at the click of a mouse. There are three versions of Google Earth—Free, Pro, and Enterprise—Pro and Enterprise have more capabilities but all three provide the public with satellite and aerial imagery of the earth, third party data, tools for creating new data points, and the ability to import GPS information. As Educators we will be using the free version of Google Earth which can be found and downloaded from http://www.google.com/earth/index.html. In recent years, educators in many disciplines have discovered that Google Earth can be used in the classroom to create engaging and interactive activities that are appropriate in a wide range of subject areas including geography, history, literature, math and more.

As a Secondary English Educator, I will be focusing on the concept of Google Lit Trips and how they are applied to the High School English classroom. Google Lit Trips is a project developed as part of the Google Certified Teachers program that allows students and teachers to utilize the information and technology of Google Earth to explore literature in a new and different ways. The Google Lit Trip can be applied to most any piece of literature even if it is only to discuss the author or the context for the author’s writing, however because of the nature of Google Earth and the notion of a literary trip, the concept appears to be best applied to literature that is set in history, discussed in relation to historical events, or is centered around some kind of trip, quest, or journey.

How to Get Started With… Google Earth and Google Lit Trips

First, students and/or teachers must download the free, easy to install version of Google Earth from http://www.google.com/earth/index.html.

Before teachers and students can even begin to implement or design a Google Lit Trip they must first familiarize themselves with the basic functions and user interface of Google Earth. Google Earth provides many resources such as the Student Google Earth User Guide which is designed to help users become familiar with its most commonly used functions. Another helpful link is the Google Earth Tip Sheet, which is a one-page summary of some of the most frequently used Google Earth functions. Students and/or teachers should definitely look these websites over before getting started.

But don’t get scared yet! While a basic understanding of Google Earth is necessary to create and utilize a Google Lit Trip, you don’t have to be a tech expert to know how to use Google Earth or a Google Lit Trip. The simplest function in Google Earth is the “Fly to” feature which allows you to search for any location in the world by typing in its address. Explore the program, zoom in and out, search for your house or your school, have fun!

Anybody recognize this building? This is William and Mary’s new School of Education in Williamsburg, Virginia!

The next step for students and teachers is to explore the Google Lit Trips home page which can be found by typing www.googlelittrips.org into your web browser.

When you arrive at the site, you will notice that there are several different selections across the top K-5, 6-8, 9-12, Hi Ed, and Downloads etc. When you click on these links, you will be able to see and download a number Google Lit Trips that have been made by other educators.

I encourage students and teachers alike to explore the site, and download several of the pre-made Lit Trips to get a good feel for what a Lit Trip is and how other educators have utilized Google Earth to contextualize literature.

Kate Reavey at Peninsula College provides two useful YouTube tutorials called Google Lit Trips: Part 1 of 2 and Google Lit Trips: Part 2 of 2 that can be found:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPiiAqXKy3g Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY55CR8vslw&feature=related

Teachers…If you are lucky enough to be teaching a unit on a book that has a pre-made Google Lit Trip, like The Aeneid or The Grapes of Wrath, you can download the trip and use it in your classroom. .I highly recommend that you thoroughly explore the information on the links and have a concrete idea of how you plan to use the Lit Trip before attempting to use a trip in class. There are thousands of links and other pieces of data that surround the pertinent information on the Lit Trip and if you are not careful the class can easily become unfocused or lost. You can also add your own information to a ready-made Lit Trip to personalize it and tailor it to your classroom.

If you cannot or do not want to apply one of the ready-made Lit Trips to your classroom and want to create your own, it is important to select a piece of literature that has a strong sense of place. A good story for a lit trip doesn't have to involve an ‘epic’ or even a long journey. A sense of place can come from either the historical significance of the setting or the centrality of the setting to the narrative, but it would be very difficult to create a lit trip for a book like George Orwell’s 1984 which lacks concrete textual references to factual places. To make your own Lit Trip on Google Earth, it is important to start by thinking about the important locations or historical events in your text. Watch some of the Tutorials on the Google Lit Trips site that take you step-by-step through the process of adding place marks and embedding multimedia information. Several of these tutorials can be found by clicking the Getting Started tab at the top of the Google Lit Trips home page. As you plan a lit trip, make sure you keep your students in mind and think about what information will help them to better understand the work and envision places they have never seen. Remember, you can embed just about anything you create or find online into a Lit Trip so it is crucial that you have a goal in mind and keep your trip focused.

Teaching The Aeneid by VirgilExample of the use of a ready-made Google Lit Trip

To use a ready-made Lit Trip such as The Aeneid, a teacher would simply download Google Earth (if that had not previously been done) then download the trip under the 9-12 tab on www.googlelittrips.org called The Aeneid by Virgil.

The trip will pop up in Google Earth in a window that looks somewhat like this:

From here a teacher can zoom in or click on the red arrows to get more detailed information about what happened at that location in the plot.

If when you try to click on a red arrow the cursor looks like:

or like then you need to zoom in more because there are multiple links underneath that one spot from that elevation.

Students…Students can create their own Google Lit trips in much the same way that a teacher would by exploring the locations characters visit, the proximity of the action of the text to important historical events, the proximity of where the students live to the action of the text, the geographic features that have an impact on the text, and much more.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Example of a Student Created Google Lit Trip (By: Laura Bagbey)

While Longfellow’s poem does not explicitly spell out the route of Paul Revere’s journey, connecting the poem to his actual ride is an interesting interdisciplinary experience for students. When a student sets out to create their own lit trip they should first do some research on Paul Revere’s ride make a list of the important locations

- Paul Revere’s House in Boston where Revere left at 10:00 pm- Charleston where he borrowed a horse from his friend Deacon John Larkin and verified

that the local “Sons of Liberty” committee had seen the pre-arranged signals. Revere leaves Charleston at 11:00 pm

- Paul Revere reaches Medford at 11:30 pm- Paul Revere arrives at the Hancock-Clarke house at 12:05 am - Revere, Dawes and Prescott captured by British on their way to Concord

(Information from http://www.paulreverehouse.org/ride/real.shtml )

Students would then locate these places in Google earth and tag them by using the yellow pushpin button in the tools bar on the top of the window. As indicated to the right.

Students can then create a folder by right clicking under the Places tab, and click “Add- Folder” and title it Paul Revere’s Ride. Students should then place the locations in the desired chronological order in the folder.

Students can then connect the locations by using the add path button (location indicated on the image below) and then dragging a path between each of the locations.

Here is an example of a path that I created to track Paul Revere’s ride. Such an example would be very easy for a high school student to create.

To further relate the Google Lit trip, students could add quotations from the poem and historic information to each place marker by right clicking on the place name in the drop down menu and then selecting properties.

To play your tour simply click on the play tour icon on the bottom right hand side of the places menu (above) and your trip will unfold before your eyes! Make sure to save your trip frequently and at the end to make sure that it is there when you return to Google Earth.

Classroom Examples The Yellow Balloon Lit Trip

The students in Mrs. Wilkes first grade class at Okapilco learned about places around the world by reading The Yellow Balloon, building a vocabulary list pertaining to land and water, and then flying to those places by using Google Earth. By starting at their school in Georgia, placing markers all over the world, and putting text into the pop up boxes these first graders made their own interactive Lit Trip of the world.To navigate to the video of Mrs. Wilkes class go to www.googlelittrips.org then click on the getting started tab, there are two how to videos that proceed this one. Click on the PowerPoint image to make the video pop up in Windows Media Player.

My Brother Sam is Dead Lit TripMrs. Carol LaRow has created an entire unit for her seventh grade classes at Iroquois

&Van Antwerp Middle Schools based off of the historical novel My Brother Sam is dead.This link provides the info on the school, teacher, and students that utilized this historical Lit Trip http://homepage.mac.com/larow2/Voyages/lit.html

This link contains the downloadable Lit Trip itself and links PDF files of chapter questions, culminating activities and more http://homepage.mac.com/larow2/Voyages/Sam/index.html

The Family Apart Lit Trip

“At Center Street Elementary School, in Williston Park, New York, Brusca teaches a library-research class for fourth and fifth graders. From talking with a fifth-grade teacher, she learned that students would be reading The Family Apart. It tells the story of the Orphan Train, which relocated homeless and abandoned children during the mid-19th century.

…Following the directions at the Google Lit Trips Web site, Brusca created a new lit trip for The Family Apart. She marked the path of the Orphan Train with a series of Google Earth "placemarks." Each one provides additional information, such as historical photographs, and poses a question for further student research.

In the school library, Brusca watched students virtually navigate the same journey the characters took aboard the Orphan Train. "I've never seen them so intent," she says. "This got them to deeper learning." The fifth-grade teacher had students create a newspaper to document the journey, which gave them another way to apply what they were learning.”

—above text quoted from the article New York Children Take a Google Lit Trip by Suzie Boss

Found on Edutopia at http://www.edutopia.org/economic-stimulus-education-technology-new-york

Notes on How to do a Google Lit TripOn this site you will not find a class utilizing a Google Lit Trip, but what you will find is

an excellent example of how a real teacher, Mr. Thomas Cooper at The Walker School utilizes and implements Google Lit Trips in his classroom and how other teachers might use them in theirs. This site is also linked to his class wiki page which has many other useful links to technology resources.

http://whaleriderproject.wikispaces.com/file/view/How+to+do+a+Google+Lit+Trip.pdf

Assessing … for the ClassroomPro’s

» Allows students to locate a great deal of abstract information (aka literary settings) in a concrete visual geographic or geospatial context

» Google Lit Tours are an effective tool for integrating the study of multiple disciplines

» Student designed Google Lit Tours create a forum for students to design and display their own data

» Allows students and teachers to work with third-party data available on the web

Con’s» Labels on the map can cause confusion when they become closely spaced at some zoom

levels.

» While Google Earth has a timeline feature that allows a viewer to rewind geographic time, the program only has images of the world from 2000 and cannot show the earth’s physical geography in the time of say, Macbeth.

» Much of the information on Google Earth is third party data, so it in necessary to use a fair amount of spatial awareness and common sense to determine the accuracy of information.

Considerations for Teachers» A live connection to the internet is required to run Google Earth even after you have

downloaded the Lit Trip so make sure your classroom has an internet connection before planning a lesson around a lit trip.

» If you are going to ask students to create their own Lit Trip, you need to be sensitive to the fact that some students may not have access to the internet at home. You need to either provide choice or give the students time to work on their projects in school.

» If you plan to use a school computer, check to make sure it is OK to download the Google Earth software.