Google Lit Trips

I attended an all day session at Region 10 on Google Lit Trips last week. I came away loving the idea of lit trips, though, I'm not sure I'll be having the kids make one any time soon. The basic concept is to take a book and plot various locations mentioned throughout the story. Google Earth makes it possible to have a 360 degree view of many, if not most, places in the world. This allows one to better understand the area being discussed and hopefully have an improved knowledge of geography, distance, and various cultures without ever standing up. The idea came from Jerome Burg, a former educator who's "retirement" is now consumed by creating new lit trips and maintaining the site. A number of the lit trips have been created by other educators and I highly recommend using them in your class. They range from mainstays like Esperanza Rising to historical locations like the Anne Frank annex.

In terms of making one or having students make their own, I may give Google a bit more time to work out the kinks. First, Google Earth must be downloaded to your computer. I ran into some issues with my own 2009 Macbook, since it uses "old" software. I can only imagine trying to install this on all of the computers in our lab, which are older and block most installations. Also, there were only 9 in the class I was taking and it was running slow due to the large amount of bandwidth necessary for operation. Imagine an entire class. Secondly, while it was easy to find the various locations, the process of linking one to the next proved to be more difficult. You have to make sure a certain box doesn't close and then when you click on a location it doesn't automatically line up, leading to a lot of zooming in and out and shifting side to side. I was dizzy by the end of the day.

In short, I came away with a lot of ideas for English, History, and Science classes, though I'm going to wait before jumping in feet first and having students create their own.