I think it’s safe to say that Google changed the way we looked at maps. Before Google, maps served us with very few purposes. We used a map to find directions to places or we used maps to find features of places. Nowadays, maps can be used to find good restaurants, track a town’s history, get photographs of a particular street, share cycling routes and so much more.
Naturally, Google Maps fits nicely into the education sector and when used with an IWB, it can wield rather interesting learning opportunities.
At a very basic level, we can find places, for example, famous landmarks (see below) or your school or a child’s house.
Moving on from there, we can use Google Maps to plan a route from two points, for example, from a child’s house to the school. If you’re feeling really adventurous, you could add photographs along the route for others to follow or do a Google Maps treasure hunt!
One thing I showed the participants on my course were my holiday photos… before I went on my holidays. Let me explain. About a month ago, I went on holidays to Italy but the month beforehand I showed the participants on my IWB course some photographs of where I was going using Google Maps. I went to the web site and typed in the town I was visiting. Once the map showed up, on the left was an option to “explore this area”. Lo and behold, once I clicked on this. a number of photographs appeared on the map. When I actually went on holiday, I looked out for the buildings in the photos…so it was a bit of a treasure hunt for me too!
I hope this gives you a couple of ideas of how to use Google Maps in a classroom.
Last Update: August 17, 2017