Tech Edge, Mobile Learning In The Classroom - Episode 09, Geography Games

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04/11/2016 Added

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Technology Information: Geography Games

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[00:00:00.534]Coming up on Mobile Learning in the Classroom,
[00:00:02.637]geography games.
[00:00:03.890](techno music)
[00:00:17.476]Hi, my name is Guy Trainin,
[00:00:18.950]and this is Mobile Learning in the Classroom from Tech Edge,
[00:00:21.457]and today I'm talking about geography games,
[00:00:23.838]and there's lots of them around.
[00:00:25.591]The thing about geography is we all want kids to know
[00:00:28.478]where things are on the world map or on a local map,
[00:00:31.903]and we want them to know it for a long time,
[00:00:34.387]but we really don't always have a lots of time to spend
[00:00:37.428]on a class in the classroom about this.
[00:00:39.622]It's all about practice, it's all about interacting
[00:00:41.969]with maps and putting meaning there.
[00:00:43.930]And so today, I want to talk about some games
[00:00:46.182]that you can give to your kids if you've got a few minutes
[00:00:48.586]or if you want to send them home and do some practice
[00:00:51.071]or if they've got a free period, something like that
[00:00:53.392]where you want them to practice.
[00:00:55.250]So the first one that I want to talk about
[00:00:59.488]comes from Rethinking Schools.
[00:01:01.868]And this is a country match on a map.
[00:01:04.991]This is the Middle East and Northern Africa.
[00:01:10.311]One as an example.
[00:01:11.863]So what you do is you locate the countries on the bottom,
[00:01:14.418]and then you drag them to point to them on the map.
[00:01:17.159]So you take, for example,
[00:01:18.427]and you recognize that this is Egypt,
[00:01:20.784]and you go to the Persian Gulf
[00:01:23.885]and you recognize Turkey right up here,
[00:01:29.318]and Cyprus.
[00:01:33.404]And you can see that if you don't put it in the right place,
[00:01:36.377]it'll give you an X and say, "No, it's not here."
[00:01:39.779]And I'm just using a large screen so you can see it,
[00:01:43.343]and here's Algeria, and what happens if you do it wrong,
[00:01:47.464]it gives you that X.
[00:01:48.719]So that's a quick and easy practice to see where you're at.
[00:01:52.538]Lots of other opportunities to do that in the same website,
[00:01:56.067]so rethinkingschools.org which has a lot of components
[00:01:59.523]has a number of these maps just straight practice.
[00:02:03.742]Great, you can throw them, kids don't need to login,
[00:02:07.063]and they can do it, get to know the geography
[00:02:11.021]of that area better and move forward.
[00:02:13.356]The next one I want to talk about is Lizard Point.
[00:02:16.599]And Lizard Point has different pieces,
[00:02:19.500]you can see up on top,
[00:02:20.824]but really I'm interested right now in the geography.
[00:02:23.157]You can see, you can look at world, Africa, the Americas,
[00:02:26.618]and going down from there.
[00:02:28.441]And what you get is a series of questions.
[00:02:30.042]So let's go into the one that I've just started
[00:02:32.783]in the Americas and you get points.
[00:02:35.243]So right now we've got the score of zero out of 93
[00:02:37.903]because we're starting a new one.
[00:02:39.365]"Where is Colombia?"
[00:02:41.385]And so you say, you point to something and you say, here.
[00:02:45.275]No, that's not it.
[00:02:46.738]You can see how this works.
[00:02:48.399]And then you can skip or you can go forward,
[00:02:51.940]for example, "Where is the Dominican Republic?"
[00:02:53.983]And you get feedback, "Yes, it is."
[00:02:55.724]And you get the next question.
[00:02:57.244]So you can see that there's quick exploration.
[00:02:59.845]And as I said, you can have different things,
[00:03:02.087]so you can do all the countries of Africa
[00:03:04.989]or capitals of Africa, so you can get more and less detail
[00:03:09.994]as you go around.
[00:03:11.701]And that's a real challenge, because here you're,
[00:03:15.695]for example, separating the fact that Africa is actually
[00:03:18.574]a continent, it's got 55 countries in it,
[00:03:21.092]and then locating those countries within that map
[00:03:24.240]is a complicated task.
[00:03:26.178]And so you can have different level of complexity.
[00:03:28.941]And the last one I want to show you is
[00:03:30.973]about the world continents and oceans,
[00:03:33.462]which is a place where we often want to start.
[00:03:36.062]So the questions are, "Where is Australia?"
[00:03:38.326]And you point to that.
[00:03:39.324]Antarctica, and so you get that kind of a thing.
[00:03:42.888]You do have to recognize that there are ads
[00:03:45.002]on this website, so you do want to consider
[00:03:47.765]whether and how you introduce the idea of ads,
[00:03:51.120]but the ads do not go over, they're just in a banner on top,
[00:03:54.429]so it's very easy to work with.
[00:03:56.925]And the next one I want to talk about,
[00:03:58.910]again on the computer,
[00:03:59.791]but there is an iPad version as well, is GeoGuessr.
[00:04:03.450]In GeoGuessr, and the app throws you somewhere in the world,
[00:04:08.245]and it looks very much like Google Earth,
[00:04:12.250]you can go up and down, and the idea is to try
[00:04:15.432]and locate yourself on the world map,
[00:04:17.498]and the closer you are the better your points are.
[00:04:20.354]So you see I've got a score here, because I started,
[00:04:22.861]and now I'm in a new place.
[00:04:24.777]I don't know where it is.
[00:04:26.020]And usually the ways to do this is to rely on topography,
[00:04:30.999]but more than that, really relying on signs
[00:04:34.553]and different ways to kind of judge where you're at.
[00:04:37.618]And the minute you're ready, you go to the world map
[00:04:40.207]and try to locate yourself.
[00:04:42.099]And in this case, I have no idea where I'm at.
[00:04:44.503]So I'm traveling down the road until I see something
[00:04:47.926]a little bit more,
[00:04:51.033]more accurate that can tell me what's going on.
[00:04:55.619]And so.
[00:04:57.163]And you can look around, so you can see,
[00:04:58.940]you can look all the way around
[00:05:01.041]and try to locate where you are.
[00:05:03.363]This doesn't give me much.
[00:05:04.524]There's a road, there are clouds, there's some trees.
[00:05:07.704]And it's definitely not a desert, that much I can tell,
[00:05:11.525]but not much more than that.
[00:05:13.045]So you travel along the road until you can locate yourself
[00:05:16.609]and once you do, you say, I think I'm
[00:05:22.160]somewhere, let's say here.
[00:05:26.223]And say, okay, make a guess.
[00:05:28.893]And I'm probably gonna be way off in this case.
[00:05:31.390]Yes, I am.
[00:05:32.445]This is somewhere in Brazil.
[00:05:33.652]This is very far away, so you don't get a lot of points.
[00:05:37.055]And you can see my points on the side,
[00:05:39.005]and then you play the next round.
[00:05:40.608]So, this really develops the skills.
[00:05:42.593]It makes kids familiar with different songs.
[00:05:44.985]We're starting to making educated guesses
[00:05:47.051]based on the environment,
[00:05:48.826]whether it's built environment, signs, or
[00:05:53.093]the topography and weather patterns
[00:05:55.392]that you can see in this work.
[00:05:57.412]So it's really interesting, it's really challenging for kids
[00:06:00.454]and it's interactive in the way
[00:06:02.935]that it teaches about the world.
[00:06:05.176]And you can create competition,
[00:06:07.311]if you want to do a competition.
[00:06:08.460]And there's actually a challenge mode
[00:06:10.052]where you're challenged against others.
[00:06:12.361]So it's more of a direct competition for that.
[00:06:15.460]So this is called GeoGuessr.
[00:06:17.018]And as I said, the iPads have something very similar.
[00:06:20.553]And now I want to switch to the iPad
[00:06:22.758]and show you a few things that are specific to the iPad.
[00:06:26.240]And the first app thing I want to talk about
[00:06:29.248]is just to show you GeoGuessr
[00:06:30.758]is very much the same on the iPad.
[00:06:34.066]You get Single Player or Pass and Play,
[00:06:36.842]so two players can play together.
[00:06:38.466]And they can select a map.
[00:06:42.008]So, for example, I like the idea
[00:06:45.549]of the world, but you can see
[00:06:47.442]that there's major cities, famous places and all of that,
[00:06:50.470]if you're willing to pay for extra.
[00:06:54.546]And you can see immediately this map has some features,
[00:06:59.109]some building features which help locate around the world.
[00:07:02.639]And you can see that there are palm trees,
[00:07:05.713]so that helps as well.
[00:07:07.351]And you can work around, and you can move around
[00:07:11.379]in a way that helps you.
[00:07:13.097]This is actually easier than the computer in some ways,
[00:07:15.581]because you just press and you see where it's going.
[00:07:18.379]And so you can run around and make your guess
[00:07:21.399]just like the GeoGuessr on the computer.
[00:07:24.324]The next one that I wanted to talk about
[00:07:26.681]is called GeoTest.
[00:07:28.260]Very similar idea to GeoGuessr,
[00:07:30.175]but here you don't necessarily move around.
[00:07:32.184]So if you're playing, it'll show you a scene.
[00:07:37.895]And you can move around, but you can see
[00:07:40.485]that this is a road,
[00:07:42.320]and now I can see that there's writing,
[00:07:44.595]and I know that it's Cyrillic letters,
[00:07:48.219]so I know it's somewhere where the Eastern Bloc used to be.
[00:07:52.282]And I will make a guess now.
[00:07:54.755]So, again, you go to the map,
[00:07:57.019]and you make a guess that this is,
[00:08:01.244]I don't know, Smolensk.
[00:08:04.576]I don't know if that's true, it's probably not.
[00:08:06.504]This was Moscow, so you get some points,
[00:08:09.639]but not necessarily bad points.
[00:08:10.984]And you can see that it's judged by the distance,
[00:08:13.877]you can see that on top.
[00:08:15.177]It's judged by the distance to the real location.
[00:08:18.580]So this is another version of the same thing.
[00:08:22.456]And allowing you to judge as a teacher would
[00:08:26.880]are the right features that you want to include.
[00:08:29.539]The last one that I want to talk about
[00:08:31.582]is app called Atlas.
[00:08:35.877]So in Atlas, what you've got is an illustrated atlas.
[00:08:38.780]I love this especially if you're working
[00:08:40.382]with the younger kids, but even beyond that,
[00:08:43.262]it's got lovely animations.
[00:08:45.165]It's got a way to look at the world so you can look
[00:08:47.544]at the globe from far away, and you can zoom back in.
[00:08:50.042]It's got main features in that area,
[00:08:52.700]and those main features are explained.
[00:08:54.779]They also have for just a little bit of pay,
[00:08:59.375]in this case 99 cents, they've got a series of games
[00:09:02.383]that you can play that are around geography.
[00:09:04.624]For example, and you can see,
[00:09:06.260]you've got Countries of the World, Countries of Africa,
[00:09:08.757]et cetera, so Landmarks of the World Quiz.
[00:09:12.820]Let's take an easy quiz.
[00:09:14.701]And say, okay in the Russian Federation,
[00:09:16.919]which one of these are there.
[00:09:19.960]And I'm choosing that one.
[00:09:21.702]So it's another way to do geography puzzles
[00:09:24.766]and geography games where kids are learning what's where.
[00:09:28.017]It's especially good, of course, after you've learned
[00:09:30.584]a continent or a series of countries.
[00:09:33.462]So this is, kids can practice this,
[00:09:35.681]even without learning anything about this.
[00:09:38.397]But this really becomes good when they do learn
[00:09:40.743]about different areas of the world
[00:09:42.298]and then they practice them.
[00:09:43.924]So today on Mobile Learning in the Classroom,
[00:09:45.966]we talked about geography games.
[00:09:47.743]And I'll see you next time
[00:09:48.800]on Mobile Learning in the Classroom.
[00:09:50.424](techno music)

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Tech Edge, Mobile Learning In The Classroom - Episode 09, Geography Games

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