Teaching Regional Geography with Google Earth for Greater Student Success and Engagement
“Amid the shift to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, educators across disciplines were faced with developing new strategies for active learning,” begins the abstract to my recent open access article, “Teaching, Learning, and Exploring the Geography of North America with Virtual Globes and Geovisual Narratives,” published September 16, 2022, in Journal of Geography, the peer-reviewed journal of the National Council for Geographic Education.
As the abstract description continues, “This article discusses findings from a case study of using Google Earth for virtual field trips and projects in an undergraduate Geography of North America course, assessing the process of incorporating Google Earth and student perspectives on their engagement with this technology. With broader applications to secondary and post-secondary education contexts, findings suggest increased student engagement and an appreciation for the opportunity to work with a geospatial technology mapping platform without needing prior coding, software, or mapping experience.”
The following is a brief excerpt from the article’s Introduction section:
“Amid the sudden shift to virtual and remote teaching and learning due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (Day et al. 2021; Keough and Kaplan 2021), educators across disciplines were faced with learning and developing new and innovative teaching strategies to promote active learning and student engagement. Some educators had experience teaching in multiple formats — face-to-face, hybrid, and online — while others were treading into uncharted territory. Yet, online education pedagogies, best practices, and resources in geography were well-established prior to the pandemic, and the opportunity for online education to reach broader and more diverse populations is well-documented (Jain and Getis 2003; Lynch et al. 2008; Dittmer 2010; Schultz 2012; Schultz and DeMers 2020). Indeed, as Schultz and DeMers (2020, 142) observe, “geography education online is neither new nor innovative but is well established as a means of providing rich geographical education to many students.” As the pandemic lingers on, educators are pursuing new forms of student engagement (Day et al. 2022).
Geography and other educators have a multitude of virtual resources to incorporate into their teaching practices. Secondary and post-secondary educators have been innovative with incorporating new technologies into their face-to-face and virtual classrooms. Now, with a further increase and interest in virtual and online learning, the need to be more innovative is even greater to reach a broader range of faculty and students who may not have previously had as much experience with online learning. Advances in freely available geovisual technology — including virtual globes and other open source online mapping visualization platforms, along with their use in the implementation of virtual field trips and the construction of geovisual narratives and story mapping — allow for ways to creatively incorporate this technology into the classroom, via its use in lectures, discussions, assignments, and larger semester-length projects.
This article discusses findings from a case study of implementing virtual globe technology — specifically Google Earth — for virtual field trips and semester projects in an undergraduate upper-level Geography of North America course. An IRB-approved online survey of participating students assessed the process and engagement related to the use of Google Earth. Specifically, the results inform two categories of findings: (1) the process and outcomes of incorporating Google Earth into the course; and (2) student perspectives on the use of this technology as a mechanism for enhancing student success and engagement. These questions emerged through the process of the author of this article — the instructor of the course comprising this article’s case study — attempting to incorporate new types of technologies into the online classroom amid the pandemic to further engage students while also providing opportunity to practice creating with different types of technology. After having taught Geography of North America, as well as other regional geography (including Europe and World Regional Geography) and systematic/thematic geography (including Introduction to Human Geography, Health Geography, Population Geography, and Urban Geography) courses, annually since 2015, typically incorporating a traditional research paper style semester project, amid the pandemic the author began incorporating other teaching strategies in this course, including the incorporation of virtual globe technology through the use of Google Earth for virtual field trips and student activities and projects in regional geography courses and the incorporation of ArcGIS Online and story mapping technology in thematic geography courses. Each of these attempts at integrating geospatial technology into regional and systematic geography courses had to be implemented in a way that was mindful of the fact that at least half or more of the enrollment in these courses are often comprised of students coming from other majors completing upper-division elective/related studies requirements who may not have had prior exposure to or experience with geospatial technology. As such, the author was interested in not only the processes and outcomes of incorporating Google Earth into this course, but also student perspectives on their use of and engagement with this technology.
As a result, there was also interest in generating information useful for evaluating this teaching strategy to inform the use of this technology in other geography classes as well as classes in other disciplines in different types of educational settings. Findings suggest increased student engagement and the appreciation for being introduced to and given the opportunity to work with a new type of technology and mapping platform without needing prior coding, software, or mapping experience. This case study also exemplifies how such technology may be incorporated not only in other geography courses but also courses in other disciplines across different curriculums for different age ranges in higher education as well as secondary education settings. This article proceeds with an engagement with the relevant scholarship, followed by a discussion of the case study and course, the use of Google Earth for virtual field trips and Google Earth Projects for the major semester project for the course, followed by a discussion of findings from an online feedback survey and concluding comments.”
Continue reading the full open access article online in Journal of Geography here.
