A Teacher’s collaborative project with Google Earth
By Emily Henderson, Program Manager, Learning & Education
For much of Micah Shippee’s 20-year career teaching social studies to middle-schoolers, the giant paper map on the wall was the focal point of the classroom. “I’d spend half the class period in front of that map, talking,” says Shippee, who teaches at Liverpool Middle School in Liverpool, New York.
Today, the paper map is still on the wall — but with the combination of the students learning remotely and physically at school, Shippee and his students are more likely to be congregating around their Chromebooks exploring the world for themselves through tools like Google Earth. Google Earth has become a creative solution for Shippee to keep the students engaged despite distance learning.
Exploring and mapping the neighborhood lakefront
The places that Shippee’s students map and study using Google Earth can be halfway around the globe — like the Google Earth story about World War I sites created through a collaborative effort by over 120 of his students. Some stories are closer to home — like the story of Onondaga Lake, just down the road from the school.
“Right in our community, we have a freshwater lake that we can’t drink the water out of,” Shippee says. He asked his students to use Google Earth to research the places where past pollution occurred, study primary source data, and add it to the Google Earth story.
What students enjoyed most about the project was that it married technology and satellite images with students’ real-world experiences. Shippee and his students walked to the lake and took pictures of lakefront areas that were missing from Google Street View. “I taught the students to use a 360-degree camera, then I uploaded the photos to Street View with my Local Guides account. We then wrote and composed stories about the lake,” Shippee explains. Those stories included students’ water-quality test results and research on the impact of industrial pollution on the lake.
What students are doing with Google Earth is about more than just mapping places, Shippee says: They’re contributing their perspectives to a global body of knowledge. “Students are so excited that they can share links with anyone around the world, and create content for a global audience. It’s not just for our little community.”
“Maybe someone lives in some town far away from here — and they have a lake, and there’s factories around it, starting to pollute it,” said one of Shippee’s middle schoolers. “They can learn about this and stop it before it happens.”
Even though this project was built before Liverpool Middle School closed as a response to COVID, it showcases how its possible for students to author and share real world stories, in their backyard and beyond, while following social distancing measures.
Collaborating on a World War I storytelling project
The skills that Shippee’s students learned from the Onondaga Lake project — such as thinking critically about source material, and weaving images and video into their presentations — inspired Shippee to assign a new project: This time, thousands of miles away from Onondaga Lake. To teach students about the sites, people and events around World War I, Shippee chose Google Earth, but added a twist: He asked students across five classes to each take on a different part of the project without meeting face to face. Shippee wanted to promote remote collaboration, communication, and expose his students to a new production workflow.
“The asynchronous learning aspect was cool because of how we could collaborate in Google Earth,” Shippee explains. “In one class, the students’ job was to find photos; in another class, the students plotted geolocations in Google Earth; and another class managed all the content and placed it all into one file. They were very excited about using the Google Earth tools, like tilting views and up and down and choosing 2D and 3D views.”
Shippee’s students aren’t the only ones learning new skills when using Google Earth. Shippee himself learns alongside the students, even picking up ideas from them as they experiment with Google Earth’s creation tools.
“My students get to see me fail, fumble and try again,” Shippee says. “They see what it means to keep trying and persevere — but the payoff is that they learn to be more creative and build professional-looking experiences in Google Earth. And that gives them a lot of confidence.”
Whether travelling across the ocean, or down the street, Shippee and his students are innovating new pathways of how technology can support creativity, collaboration, and learning.
