Week 4: Day 1

This week I have planned a fantastic activity using Google Earth. Students will have to recreate the journey of Australian explorers Robert O'Hara Bourke and William John Wills. The idea is that students will research and map the trip on Google Earth. They will have to place markers, measure distances in kilometers and retrace their path.

Today being the first lesson students were introduced to the expedition and we did a little bit of brainstorming about it. They were placed in groups of 5 and asked to use Google and the school library to research about the expedition. They were asked to produce a fact sheet using Word for Windows, stating accurate information including dates and place of departure and arrival as well as 10 stops along the way that were significant. The fact sheet had to be clear and referenced. They were asked to check at least two sources.

The students were very enthusiastic about the task. It was a very noisy lesson but it was "good learning noise". I had been to the library earlier to borrow some books that the students could use so some chose them to be their main source of information. Two groups decided they would google-it instead.

As I roam around the room, the students were working enthusiastically, they all have a netbook, so they were all googling at the same time and jotting things down on paper. This made me think of another lesson I could teach about using Google documents and share a document amongst all students and teach them how to copy and paste information straight into the document for later editing. (Too much to do!!!)

The students encountered only little problems, more to do with the content that with the technology. Luckily internet was working today!