WEEK 5 – GOOGLE – Maps, Earth and Documents

Everytime I sit down at the computer and search for something the first place I head to is the Google Search Engine as I find it the best place to start when I am looking for something or researching information for assignments on the internet. I have also used Google Maps on several occasions to get directions on somewhere I am wanting to go and finding out how long it might take me to get to my destination. Until doing some further reading I did not realise that Google Maps also allowed you to create your own maps with the feature to add positioning markers, polylines and polygons as well as embed images, video or text. This would be an invaluable tool to use in the classroom when undertaking subjects requiring this type of assessment or knowledge such as navigation lessons in maths and geographical themed lessons. 

Another feature of Google is Google Earth. This was my first time using Google Earth and believe that using this together with Google Maps would provide exciting learning experiences for the students. Google Earth gives you the opportunity to zoom into just about anywhere in the world giving satellite images and complete 360⁰ panoramic street views allowing users to view cities, houses and historical buildings, maps, terrain, 3D building images and even mountains such as Mt Everest. This is definitely something I would consider using as a Learning Manager as it provides the chance to explore different parts of the world, view areas that were subject to widespread natural disasters and even explore the moon, mars and sky which would be great for subjects such as astronomy right from the comfort of your home or classroom.

Finally another feature of Google that I explored was Google Docs. This was also something I didn’t realise was available even though I was a regular user of Google. It is a data storage service that allows you to save documents and gives you the ability to be able to access them from any computer that has internet facilities. It gives the option of being able to save privately or publicly. If saved publicly it gives other users the chance to edit or add to making it an excellent collaboration tool. It has similar features of a wiki but allows multiple users to be editing at once creating a great learning together environment. This is definitely something I will start using myself as I think it is also a much better way to back up information instead of having to remember to take my USB stick with me everywhere. Google Docs would have certainly been handy to know about when I was doing a group assignment earlier this year externally through another university. It would have saved our group a great deal of time as emailing back and forth was extremely time consuming and it would have enabled us to share the workload more evenly.