Saturday, April 7, 2007
Make Your Own Google Maps
This post is making its way from blog to blog, but in case you haven't seen it, I want to include it here. You can make your own maps on Google. Think of the teaching possibilities. In fact, you can see what some teachers suggest in the responses to Will's post. Try it out and then let me know what you come up with!
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I think students would make great use of this given the opportunity to do so in school. Hearing Dana Ferris from California State University at Sacramento speak last week gave me an idea of how a project like this could be a very useful way to integrate a classroom containing students with varying language backgrounds. Her presentation on "multilingual writers" was somewhat alarming given that ESL/EFL students make up a rapidly growing, yet still marginalized, population of students that are widely misunderstood and unsupported. I think that integrating a wide variety of visual texts into the classroom would help bridge the language barrier gaps between students. This map activity in particular could increase tolerance, awareness, and help students relate to one another by sharing the various "routes" that brought them to the classroom they are now in. Writing their own stories and using visuals as a "common language" to communicate their experiences with each other would be a highly valuable learning experience that a teacher could scaffold future instruction off of. I wonder about other ways of incorporating and using visual texts in order to teach students languages that are new to them.
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