I would like to announce the launching of a new online resource for math teachers. Real World Math – Using Google Earth in the Math Curriculum
provides lessons, activities, and new ideas that bring math instruction into this millennium. Intended for grades 5 and up, this material offers an Instructional Technology approach to learning. Google’s free 3D world of satellite imagery is used in active learning exercises designed to stimulate math students' higher-level thinking skills.
There are currently 20 lessons on the site and more to come with your help. Educators are encouraged to participate on the website's Community
page by offering advice, feedback, or by submitting Google Earth lessons themselves. Please visit the site @ realworldmath.org
and have a look. Help spread the word by recommending the site to others!
If you've been following the other Google Earth discussion on Classroom 2.0, you will remember that I wanted to bring more meaningful content into my math lessons. Thank you to all of you who added to that discussion and all of your kind suggestions. A little collaboration and some creativity can go a long way. Pardon my bias, but I think a lot of the Instructional Technology tools utilized by educators thus far have been linguistic in nature. Don't get me wrong, I think blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks such as this one are terrific, but they have left the math department a bit envious. This is one reason why I have created Real World Math.
And so, I would like to start a new thread of discussion based on my experiences constructing these Google Earth lessons and the website to display them. Primarily in the non-linguistic subject areas, how can we nudge IT experiences that way? How do you conceptualize, design, build, and promote content-based material for a subject such as Science?