Recently, I had the privilege of presenting a school project at the AIS NSW STEM Symposium with two 
of my wonderful Year 10 students at the University of NSW in Sydney. Our project is called ‘Journeys through Wombool’. This project is an interactive map of our local river incorporating cultural, historical, geographical and ecological perspectives. It links to Australian and NSW Stage 5 curriculum outcomes in Science, Geography and History.
Originally I was planning to use augmented reality to place virtual Easter eggs in different locations. Unfortunately, the technology seemed buggy and difficult to access and the conventions of geo-caching and geo-tagging did not seem to support what I was hoping we could do.
Luckily, Google introduced My Maps to the Drive apps. Problem solved! As a Google Apps for Education school, My Maps was easy to access and for students and staff to collaborate on a single project. My Maps allowed us to incorporate information and multimedia and attach it to a geographical location. We could do this by roughly finding a location on the map or by using exact coordinates when we had them. The technology was simple to use, freeing us to concentrate on the content and exploration.
The presentation below gives an overview of the project:
I hope that our students can continue to add to the map over coming years as we explore more of the Macquarie River. One delegate at the Symposium suggested we create an ‘open’ version for the whole community. An idea worth exploring…
Below is our project. Click on a point on the map for information and media. One of my favourite elements is the Tracker Riley Bike Track: Soundscape.
h it, especially will the on-going feature improvements. There is a lot of information out there about how to use Google Classroom, from basics to more advanced management, and I thought it may be useful to bring some of this information together in one post. Whether you’re thinking about using Classroom for the first time, introducing it to others or have been using it regularly, you should find something useful in this collection.