5th Grade Amazing Race Project
So we’re just finishing up this cool project in 5th grade where the students made Google Earth files for their Amazing Race project. Download the Google Earth file here.
Basically the 5th grade teachers wanted to do an Amazing Race theme and have the students plot on a map 7 different countries they wanted to visit. The students then had to research the different countries and find facts about them. Then they had to choose two cities within each country to have their ‘contestents’ visit within those countries.
Instead of using a map on paper we took the project to Google Earth and had the students each make their own Google Earth file with their country information. There is so much more that could have been done with this project, but we are still in a content driven system, so the teachers needed to move on. But overall a great start on using technology. These little files (12kb) will be uploaded to the teachers’ Edline page where parents can then download them and view them at home, or view other students’ in the class. It would be cool to combine all 100 student accounts into one big file and see all the different places they choose….OK, just gave myself another project…back to work. 🙂
[tags]SAS, 21st Century Learner[/tags]
What a fantastic idea! I’ve been keen on using Google Earth in my classes, but I thought it may have been fairly limited in secondary Maths education. I’ll have to revisit this and find a way to better implement Google Earth.
[…] If you read my “About me” page, you would have noticed that I am interested in using Google Earth in my teaching. As a Mathematics teacher, so far it has been limited to where certain Mathematicians lived, worked etc. Lots of ideas for other people’s classes that I’ll share one day as I continue to create new blog entries. But today, I read Jeff Utecht’s blog and how his Grade 5 class has made a fun and exciting project based on “The Amazing Race”. As Jeff wrote: Basically the 5th grade teachers wanted to do an Amazing Race theme and have the students plot on a map 7 different countries they wanted to visit. The students then had to research the different countries and find facts about them. Then they had to choose two cities within each country to have their ‘contestentsÂ’ visit within those countries. […]