Tag: Google

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First Google Map Discovered – Created in 1652

I enjoy looking at historic maps and other visual displays of information. I was browsing online images from the National Gallery of Art’s current exhibit “Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age” and was startled to see  “A Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam” painted (around 1652), by Jan Micker.

Micker’s work certainly parallels the Google Map satellite view. Especially noteworthy are his realistic depiction of details, shadows of clouds and the large key with drop shadow in the lower right corner. Not bad considering he lacked an aerial perspective. He was inspired by a similar work (minus shadows) from 1538 by Cornelis Anthonisz. 

Below is a current Google Map of Amsterdam for comparison. 
Note: the Google maps faces north. Micker’s view faces south.
Click map to enlarge or go to Google map of Amsterdam 

Google

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Teaching with Historic Photographs: The Google LIFE Photo Archive

Google has posted ten million photographs from the LIFE photo archive on their online gallery of images. It's a great source of material for teachers and students who support a document-based approach to teaching history. 

While I wish that Google had done more to curate the collection with robust search tools and more specific categories, I think that teachers will find it to be an invaluable resource to enable students to "be the historian."

I've put together this quick guide to help you get started.

1.  If you are unfamiliar with the document-based approach to teaching history, you might want to start with a quick visit to my web site Teaching With Documents. There you find many resources including Document-Based Questions (DBQ) for  students grade 2 – high school. Of particular interest are these Student Analysis Guides and for more detailed analysis – my Reading a Visual Document: Guiding Questions. (55KB pdf)

2.  If you are interested in how historic documents can be used to support literacy and critical thinking, visit my sample:  Homefront America in WW II.  It shows how to improve content reading comprehension with source documents framed around essential questions that link the past and present. 

3.  Now that you have some instructional background in using historic photos – it's time to visit the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google. It's organizes images by era and subject. Once you click on an image you get a brief description and some labels (tags) that allow you to find similarly tagged images. 

Lange For example here's one of the archive photos taken by Dorothea Lange in the Migrant Mother Series. It makes a great contrast to the iconic photo she took that day that is more commonly reproduced in textbooks. (You might ask your students which of the five photos they would choose, and why?)

The LIFE archive includes this description with the photograph: Migrant mother Florence Thompson & children photographed by Dorothea Lange.
Location: Nipomo, CA, US
Date taken: 1936
Photographer: Dorothea Lange

And LIFE archive uses these labels for this photo: Lange, Dorothea, Mothers, Fsa Photographers, Us, Tension Or Worrying, American, Poverty, Florence Thompson, Photography By, Migratory, Farmers, California, Expressions, Agriculture, 1930s
4.  If you don't already use Cooliris, I suggest you download this free browser plug in. It presents the photos in a broad panorama that  allows you to scroll through many images.  I've embedded a short clip below of Cooliris in action, so you can see how it can transform your browser when searching for images and videos on Cooliris supported websites.

5.  And remember that all Google image searches allows you to specify image size with this drop down box in the upper left of the screen. 



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Search Strategies Revealed

I thought this recent article from the New York Times "At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool" opened with the interesting quote on search strategies.  

Faced with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many student begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube.

18ping.1901“I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again.

While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time.

“When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google,” said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif.

Tyler is a self-directed and reflective learner, who monitors his progress. That's good news for educators as long as we can harness his growth, not stand in his way. As Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, once said “Search is highly personal and empowering. It’s the antithesis of begin told or taught.” 

Noah Berger for The New York Times
Tyler Kennedy, 9, at home in California, uses YouTube to research reports for school and to hunt tips to advance in his video games.
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Build Literacy Skills with Wordle

I’ve always been interested in quantitative displays of information. I’ve been having lots of fun with Wordle – a free website that creates “word clouds” (or “tag clouds”) for text analysis. Simply copy/paste text and in seconds Wordle gives you a visual representation of word frequency. The example below was created by analyzing all the words used in my blog in 2008. Click the screen shots below to enlarge.
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While you can directly type into the Wordle text box, I would recommend you copy and past text into it. That allows you to get text directly from online sources or your own text document. Student can either work on their individual Wordles or collaborate together on one. In the later case, it’s probably most efficient to gather all their writing into one text document before copy/pasting it into a Wordle. Use tilde sign to create phrases. Example: learning~strategies. Another tip: After you create a Wordle, right click a term to remove it from the Wordle results. 

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The site allows you to modify the color scheme, font, alignment and even set the maximum number of words to include in the analysis (example top 100 words, top 50 words, etc) For inspiration on layout see these Wordle samples at Flickr

Wordle output – If you PDF generating software, you can “print” a Wordle to a PDF file. Or you can do a screen capture of the Wordle. Do live Wordles on your smartboard. For a how-to on screenshots click here.

So how could your students use Wordle?
Defining  skills – Before the dictionary comes out, give your students a new vocabulary word and ask them to brainstorm all the word they associate with it. Gather up all the brainstormed words for a Wordle. After the term has been formally defined, repeat the process and compare to the “pre-dictionary” Wordle.

Summarizing skills – As a pre-reading exercise – copy/paste text of reading into  a Wordle and ask students to predict what the main ideas of the reading will be. Another pre-reading option – give them a Wordle of a non-fiction reading and ask them to use the Wordle to generate a title or headline before they see the real article. Post reading – ask them to reflect on the reading based on a prompt (examples – main idea, what you’ve learned, funniest element, etc). Then collect all their reflections into a Wordle.

Comparison skills – Give them two different accounts / essays on the same theme / event – let them compare the Wordles generated by each. Or you could generate Wordles for two different reading – then let student see if they can match the Wordle to it’s corresponding reading.

I’ve been collaborating with fellow educators on a Google Doc guide to using Wordle in the classroom

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Visual Literacy: How Do Your Students Share Their Thinking?

The perceived audience / purpose for most student work is the teacher / because it was assigned. Learning becomes more meaningful when students are given chances to share their thinking with more authenticity. It's as simple as adding an audience to an assignment. Example: "How would you explain your solution to younger students?" This also opens the door to more relevant self evaluation. "Did my presentation suit my audience and purpose?"

Periodic-table
Visual literacy is the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations. Visual-Literacy.org has assembled a collection of visualizations in as a periodic table. Mouse over each element and a sample pops up. The examples range from simple to complex and they provide a vast array of approaches beyond the overused Venn diagram or T-chart. 

A pdf of the table is also available. On another page you can group the visualization methods by your criteria and  find background information for a specific visualization method via Google Images and Wikipedia