In which X marks the spot
Posted By Kevin Gaugler on November 18, 2008
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While preparing for a presentation to be given this Saturday at ACTFL about online mapping tools (shameless plug), I thought I’d share a few thoughts on the subject with our readers. Google Maps was launched in 2005 and the ability to personalize maps has only been available since April of 2007. It is not surprising, then, that a robust set of best practices for integrating online mapping tools into language education has yet to coalesce. I suspect that since new features for Google maps are often rolled out quietly, many faculty simply don’t know about them. In this post, I thought I would simply present some of my favorite Google maps features. In the future, I’d like to discuss ideas for integrating such tools into our lessons.
In spite of the lack of fanfare around Google’s new mapping features, it does surprise me that Google’s MyMaps has not taken the language learning community by storm, since the tool allows one to attach a variety of media to any map or satellite image. Below you will find an example of a map of the Valle de los Caídos that one of my students customized by adding photos and videos of the monument’s construction as well as videos of Francisco Franco’s funeral.
Groups of students can even work on a project together to label a series of places with a variety of media. Here is an example of a collaborative Google Map called the Postcard Exchange Project. The project was started during the Fall of 2008 by a private Catholic school in Beaverton, Oregon and invites anyone to create a digital postcard with the Google maps toolset and peg it to their location.
Remember that you can search for others’ customized maps that are made public or even browse the directory of maps. I have found some incredibly useful maps this way for my Spanish class such as the Madrid para turistas map.
The final feature of Google Maps that I’d like to highlight is one called StreetView. Google StreetView began in May of 2007 when Google mounted a 360 degree live camera to the top of a fleet of vans and drove around San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Miami, and New York City. In the spring of 2008, Google vans captured the Tour de France route and has been adding international destinations ever since. For the purpose of teaching languages other than English, only cities in Europe and Japan are available. However Google, as always, adds new destinations all the time. Wikipedia does a good job of keeping me up to date on newly added destinations. To explore Google StreetView, simply go to the link, pick a city on the map with a camera icon, and take a stroll downtown. Below you’ll see a street view of Florence, Italy. Feel free to take a walk around by clicking on the arrows or take a look around by holding down your mouse button and moving the cursor.
Information tagged to a map is a relatively new phenomenon on the Internet. Location-based services will become increasingly more sophisticated as such information becomes easier to create and to search. For example, GPS cameras are beginning to hit the market. Soon, every digital image we take will be ‘geostamped’, adding useful data to the Internet. Imagine the possibilities for your classroom when every photograph taken will be marked with the precise location where it was taken. Such information would make Google StreetView look primitive. Microsoft Labs’ Photosynth project has already begun to experiment with splicing together photographs of well-known locations taken by many different people; with GPS coordinates attached to each image this process would accelerate exponentially, allowing for a three dimensional representation of our world.
Not only will digital media be able to represent the world, but it will soon be able to label everything in the physical world. Companies have already created services built around GPS-enabled cellular phones. If you would like to take a look into the future of learning, watch the video below. It features a-soon-to-be-available application by Tonchidot for the iPhone that uses the built-in GPS to display information about the one’s environment as one looks through the phone’s camera. Imagine having all the information that’s already posted to Google Earth viewable to you as you walk down the street. Better yet, imagine how one would learn about places in such an environment. Then send your thoughts to us by posting a comment to the blog or by sending us an email at feedback@worldatways.com.
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