Google Lit Trips – A SGVCUE Coffee Break

By On March 4, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Conferences, CUE, How To, Informational, SGVCUE, Technology

On March 3rd, the San Gabriel Valley CUE affiliate put on one of their Coffee Breaks. The title of the Coffee Break was Bring Your Literature to Life With Google Lit Trips. The description of the Coffee Break was:

“Bring literature to life! Join us as we explore literature in an exciting way and get a glimpse of what can happen in your classroom with Google Lit Trips. Regardless of grade level, imagine the power, understanding, depth, and excitement this free tool can bring.”

The facilitators were, Michele Parga and Catherine Rodriguez and they are both consultants with the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

Katie Warren started the day with introductions of the board and then we were off to learn about Google Earth and Google Lit Trips. Michele Parga from LACOE started the presentation talking about her time when she was a student.   She was in Mrs. Young’s class and she always shared pictures of her trips.  ”She put the personal touch into the classroom”, said Michelle.  Michelle reflected on how much better she did in her class because of Mrs. Young’s ability to bring and share real life and places into her classroom.  As Michelle concluded her story she summed up her experience in Mrs. Young’s class in a few words, “it became real”.

Michele started by showing Google Lit Trips creator, Jerome Burg’s (@jburg) video.  He will be the feature Keynote speaker at the upcoming SGVCUE Tech Fair on May 5th, 2012. Register here: http://goo.gl/KHxH8

Other resources are here located in this Google Doc: http://goo.gl/pv0g0

They include:

These resources have many great places to visit and it provides a great start to bringing the world to your classroom.  Catherine and Michele showed we can create our own lit trip!  We were shown how to place a pin for landmarks.  Within those pins we can embed video, pictures and even audio to really make the experience come alive in Google Earth.

Catherine took over the presentation and share how you can embed YouTube and Vimeo videos into Google Earth. Also she demonstrated how to put audio into the trip.

There was plenty of time to share, play and create the features and ideas that were shared.

One of the ideas that was being shared was putting QR Codes into our Lit Trips.  One can have QR codes made for different cities and/or locations to be scanned with a link in Google Earth.

Along with these resources and the ones to come we all can make our classrooms “real”.  Bringing the world to the students that may never make it to the beach or the mountains.  These virtual field trips allows students to travel without ever leaving their classroom or school.

Here are some photos from the Coffee Break:

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