Technology based lesson

For my technology based lesson, I plan to teach geography aided by social conferencing software and google earth. Since geography has generally been something that is hard for students to relate to because they historically have not been able to experience the other areas in the content, I wanted to bring geography to life for my students.

I plan to use Google Earth to show the students where another region is on the earth in relation to our region. This will allow the students a three dimensional view of the geography that they can move and manipulate to explore. Instead of simply looking at a flat map, this gives students a better visual perspective to relate the two areas together.

I then plan to use Skype to make another region real to the students. I am in touch with classrooms in England that may be willing to Skype with a class here in the United States to have structured discussion about physical and human characteristics of the region. This will give the students faces to relate to the places they are learning about, a visual representation of the clothing, an aural representation of the language and dialects, and other children to talk to.

This would, of course, have to be flanked in discussion so as to guide the students' thinking toward similarities and differences between regions and what this means for us socially.