Google World Wonders

As a former Geography teacher, Google World Wonders sounded wonderful to me.  In the World Geography SOLs there are World Monuments which the students have to be able to identify--Taj Mahal, Big Ben, the Gateway Arch, etc. I knew that Google World Wonders utilized Google Earth street level imagery and I figured that this would be a terrific way to teach these monuments.  Well,  it is, but, I was disappointed to learn that the monuments which can be visited on a World Wonders virtual field trips are limited to a mere 173. This means that of the cultural monuments in the United States, for example,  the Golden Gate Bridge and Independence Hall are among the wonders included, but, the U.S. Capital building and the Gateway Arch are not. Neither is the Eiffel Tower.

With both the capital building and the Eiffel Tower, I found that if I clicked on the Maps icon in my Google Apps box, searched for these locations, and then switched to the street level view, they have some terrific views of those landmarks.  That being the case, why would a geography teacher, or any other teacher, use the World Wonders site rather than just using Google Maps?  I, for one, would certainly use both were I still in the classroom.

 What Google World Wonders has that a street level view elsewhere may not have would be "details"--that is some script giving a bit of  background information about the site. They also have "collections", put together by Google.  These collections might include historic photographs as well as current ones.  For example, you can compare Louis XIV's bedroom as it appeared in the 19th century with how it looks today. In addition you can look  through "user galleries" which is just what the name implies--pictures put together in an album, which some user has created for others to view. Quite often these galleries will include comments from the user as well as details about where the photograph came from, etc. Finally, you can create your own collections--that is, you can gather various items available at Google World Wonders into an album of your own--organize them, add comments, and then show them, or make them available to your students. However, you cannot add photos or other items from outside the project (except for YouTube videos--which you can add--so I guess you could put photos into a YouTube video and add that--once you take care of the filtering issues.)

Here is what someone else had to say about the educational use of World Wonders:

"The World Wonders Project offers an Education page dedicated to assisting educators in history and geography topics. Teacher guides are available for primary school and secondary school. These guides include activity sheets, lesson plans, and presentations. Beyond the obvious use of the free guides, the resources, pictures, historical content and 360 degree view are easy to use and are organized for quick accessibility in the classroom.... The most developed program is secondary school history and geography topics. History topics include: Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Pompei, Herculaneum and Torre Annuziata, Liverpool, Palace of Versailles, Florence, and Independence Hall. Geography topics include: Ogasawara Islands, Dorset and East Devon Coast, and Paris. Each topic includes teaching activity sheets, lesson plans, and presentations."

Etec602.wikispaces.com,. 'Etec602 - Google World Wonders Project'. N. p., 2015. Web. 6 Feb. 2015.

Again, if I were in the classroom, I'd certainly ALSO use Google Maps or Google Earth to bring a street level view of World Monuments to my Geography students.  In addition to Social Studies applications, Google World Wonders might be useful for literature, science (World Wonders includes some nice underwater shots), and even math (angles on the Eiffel Towers, math problems involving the Leaning Tower of  Pisa, etc.) What can you come up with?

The Art Project

Jim Sill, a former television and movie producer, presented a session on the Google Art Project.  If you have some time after the SOLs and before the end of the year, you may with to create a lesson based on the Google Art Project which is part of a larger effort by Google known as the Google Cultural Institute.

You have probably heard that Google is digitizing books which are out of copyright, and putting them on the internet.  You are also familiar with Google Earth.  Okay, so the Google Art Project kind of combines these ideas for works of art.  The Google Art project, as of this writing, works with 345 museums throughout the world and contains 63,684 works by 8,574 artist, which various users (such as us) have arranged into 26,518 galleries.  At some of these museums the user can go to a ground level view (as with Google Earth) and use the mouse to walk around the museum.  Some of the works of art are featured in extremely high resolution--like ten billion little pixels.  

I especially like the different filters you can use when searching through this volume of material.  A user can search by artists, by collection, by medium (oil, pen and ink, bronze, etc.) by the event that inspired the artwork, by the date it was created, by media type (video, photo, etc.), or by place.  In addition, a user can search the galleries created by other users--for example one might search using “math” as a filter.  In this case the result may be a collection of pictures accompanied by questions on the prominent angles in the picture.  The person who compiled the gallery may also have embedded links, or perhaps even a video on various artworks in the gallery.

I’ll resist the temptation to go into the technical aspects of how to use the art project.  Rather, let me just state that as far as “how to use” it, you could certainly use it in teaching art, or math (see above), or history--(search by material and date and the students will immediately be able to see when the bronze age was), or literature (analyze the relationship between the artwork of a period on the literature produced in that period), or science (I find a photo of a solar eclipse taken in 1889--the user included an embedded map showing the exact location where the photo was taken.)  I even found a gallery named “Bias Awareness and Bullying Prevention.”  

I’ve tried to keep this post short and interesting, so that you have the curiosity and time to go to the Google Art Project and check it out for yourself.  Click on Mr. Sill, if you wish to check out all of the resources he made available in relation to this session.  Finally, if you visit the Google Cultural Institute, you might also want to check out the World Monuments and Historic Moments which are there along with the Art Project.