Laura Guertin using Google Earth in courses to promote geographic understanding

Laura Guertin, associate professor of earth sciences at Penn State Brandywine, is using Google Earth to promote geographic literacy among her university students, and ultimately K-12 students as well.

As a 2010 Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) Faculty Fellow, Guertin is exploring several uses of the tool. One is to create an exercise to explore dinosaur museum sites in Google Earth, where students arrive at a "pin" on a map, then must choose between two locations to go to next, eventually making their way to the correct museum based on clues to the dinosaur's identity. "I'm interested in digital storytelling," she said, explaining that she wanted to use Google Earth to create something similar to a choose-your-own-adventure book series, but make it scientifically accurate.

Along with her Faculty Fellow team from TLT including Chris Stubbs, Chris Millet, and T.K. Lee, Guertin is developing a template based on the dinosaur example. She will ask her students to use the template to plug in their own earth sciences content and create their own branching exercises. For example, she plans to use the template in a future course on green transportation in the Philadelphia area. The team has devised a way to easily populate preformatted pop-up boxes that open when you click pins on a map with content entered into a Google spreadsheet. This means the template can be easily used by others with minimal technical knowledge or use of HTML formatting.

Guertin plans to make the template available to other Penn State faculty in any discipline. In fact, although the template is not yet fully developed, she has already begun collaborating with another Faculty Fellow, Ann Clements, associate professor of music education, to explore its use to help music students associate various musical styles with their geographic context.

The two will be placing information and example files on a new Web site called "Teaching World Music with Geospatial Technology" at http://www.personal.psu.edu/uxg3/blogs/googleearthmusic/. The project history page of the site explains how the two Fellows learned of each other's projects, each of which sparked the other's imagination. A bonus of the Faculty Fellow program is that with more than one faculty member working on projects simultaneously, their creative ideas get cross-pollinated between fields of study.

Guertin is also interested in spreading her knowledge of and enthusiasm for Google Earth with middle school and high school teachers. Some of her students have visited schools to give presentations on the potential of Google Earth as a learning tool. Her "Earth and Space Sciences QUEST" Web site at http://www.personal.psu.edu/uxg3/blogs/googleearthquest/ features Google Earth "journeys" her students have created for the benefit of K-12 students.

Another use of Google Earth Guertin is exploring is that of a student e-portfolio. TLT team leader Stubbs said that in a new fall course Guertin is teaching, EARTH 400 Earth Sciences Seminar, themed on fire, she will ask students to use Google Earth as a sort of "centerpiece" featuring their podcasts, videos, interviews, and reflections on a planned trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania. She will then incorporate all the student maps into a course blog.

"I use Google Earth a lot in my courses," said Guertin. "I really like nontraditional assignments that encourage creativity." She noted that as students develop content to include in their Google Earth assignments, they will need to practice their writing skills. "It doesn't hurt to make students do more writing," she remarked.

When asked what kind of feedback her students have given on the use of Google Earth in her courses, Guertin said, "My students have had fun. I don't want the technology to be distracting so they don't learn the content. With Google Earth, I have not had any students have problems. They are very comfortable with the interface."

Over the course of summer 2010, members of Guertin's Faculty Fellow team are posting updates and reflections about the project at the TLT Faculty Fellows blog site at http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/fellows/. To learn more about the TLT Faculty Fellows program, visit http://tlt.its.psu.edu/faculty/fellowship.