Goggle apps

I found the goggle lesson plans really interesting. They had many great features and lessons on their but the two i chose were rather simple. The first was actually intended for fine arts but with simple adaptations could be both social studies and fine arts. The lesson required each student to create photographic tour of the United States using famous photos. I felt that if the lesson was presented as a social studies lesson the students could use the same basic idea to outline westward expansion. The lesson also required the use of goggle earth which would help the student understand the landscape the people who he or she was finding pictures of was crossing. I think that this could be a fun and inciteful lesson for a highschool american history class. Many children do not get to travel to the west and even if they do they go by plane so they never seet the terrain that the settlers crossed.

The second lesson I found was about pandemics and global disease. It was a group project that would use several of the google apps. The groups would be assigned a different part of a pandemic. For example one group would do the history of the pandemic where it started why all the simple factual stuff. The second group would be responsible for saying how governements both nationally and localy reacted to the situation. The third group would track how the news media reacted to the pandemic and wether this furthed the pandemic or lessened it. Once they had done their research they would be required to make a video as a group showing this information and put it on the class website as a pod cast.

I think the podcast idea would have been really neat for several projects I did while in highschool. One imparticular was a video project we did. It caused alot of problems trying to play all the videos in the classroom because they were all saved to different devices (VHS DVD on a jump drive on a computer) it became a mess where as if we all had posted them as pod casts all the teacher would have had to do is click on it and away it went. Another thought I had was that for student council elections highschools should record and put up speeches as a pod cast. I think this might help to ensure that students actually listen to what is said and don't just remember the funny jokes.