How Educators Teach Geography with Tech Tools

In 2006, the National Geographic-Roper literacy survey showed that only 37 percent of college-age students could identify Iraq on a regional map of Southeast Asia.

But U.S. troops had been in Iraq since 2003.

And last week, student scores on the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress were released in a report on geography. Between 2001 and 2010, average scores for fourth-graders moved from 208 to 213 out of a possible 500. Eighth-graders and twelfth-graders' scores didn't change significantly.

"One of the challenges you see reflected in the NAEP data is the lack of attention to geography at the postsecondary level," said William Gaudelli, associate professor of social studies and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Few colleges have geography departments, and the ones that do are often land grant universities like Penn State. And then there's the chicken and egg problem: If you don't teach geography, students don't know about it, so there's no demand for learning geography, Gaudelli said.

With each survey and report on geography that comes out, we talk about it for a few weeks, and then geography disappears from the spotlight.

Keep reading to find out the challenges that educators face in teaching geography and how they use ed tech tools to make geography relevant to their students.

The quest for relevant geography education

The first big challenge with teaching geography is that some students don't care about other people and places, so they don't want to learn about them, said Mark Miyashita, a social studies teacher at Castleview High School in Colorado.  And another challenge is getting students to understand what's going on in the world.

Miyashita relates world events to students' lives and explains why they should care. For example, they talk about the Middle East conflicts and the U.S. role in them.

In Douglas County School District where he works, geography and social studies scores haven't been a priority, and graduation credits have been reduced for social studies.

Few good models of practice, research, writing and professional development exist on geography, said Brad Siegal, the supervisor of social studies for Scotch Plains-Fanwood School District in New Jersey who's moving on to a regional director of curriculum position.

Especially in the U.S., geography means memorizing locations and working on maps. It doesn't focus on the human element.

"Really it's not taught that much or it's not taught that well, and it's usually within a history class," Siegal said.

Students live geography. But they don't recognize it, Gaudelli said. Their cell phones have data about their location. GPS devices center on geography. And access to nutritious food is governed by where students live.

For example, students who live in a poor urban area are less likely to have access to nutritious food at the local corner store. 

If educators give students access to these technological devices, they can explore social issues. And that's more compelling than learning to read a map in an abstract fashion.

From what he's seen in online samples, the NAEP test asks students conceptual skill questions, not compelling questions that apply to their lives.

"Both the testing and the implementation of curriculum needs to have a sort of local bearing and relevance that would really encourage kids to see the explanatory value of geography," Gaudelli said.

The ed tech adventures

In the small town of Fillmore in Southern California, the beach and the mountains are half an hour away. But many low-income families don't take their fourth-grade students there, said Amber Henrey, a teacher at Mountain Vista elementary.

The students don't know what's outside their town. And that makes teaching geography tough.

"It's important that you give them a sense of place within their own community first because that's all they know and all they think about," Henrey said.

She started using Google Earth to give them a sense of place. But after she had trouble downloading the virtual trips on a new computer, she switched to Google Maps, which she says is the quickest and easiest way to take students to different locations.

"As we're flying to Florida or the White House, they're able to sense, 'Oh, that's how far it is,'" Henrey said.

Last year, she had to visually cover both the Gold Rush and missions to meet California's standards. But she could only take the kids on one physical field trip.

So they went on a real tour of a mission and a virtual tour of Sutter's Fort.

As part of the mission project, students could choose to build a mission or create a presentation that includes a virtual 360 tour, a link to a Google map and screencaptures of what they do.

If students are ahead in a subject and need an independent project, she has them dowebquests like this one. They take screenshots of what they do and turn in a final product.

They also read and discuss articles in Scholastic News about current events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the earthquake that hit Japan.

The geography curriculum at Scotch Plains-Fanwood School District has moved away from studying regions and places. Instead, the curriculum centers around global issues including land usage, ecotourism and trade. They debate, discuss and do projects on these issues.

Sixth-graders studied the scarcity of water in Africa, and other students created Google Earth tours complete with written narratives.

"Any kind of media that allows students to get a different perspective that's more visually engaging is important," Siegal said.

The district also uses the StrataLogica program, which is built on Google Earth's application programming interface and has a multi-dimensional globe and mapping features. 

Teachers add handheld GPS devices in the mix to help students find a practical application for latitude and longitude.

But Siegal isn't a big advocate for the geographic information system program. While it probably has great tools students can use, it's written more for geographers, not practitioners of education.

The bursting of the bubble

In Colorado, social studies teacher Miyashita hasn't gotten into geographic information systems as much as he would like to. But he is creating a menu of ed tech options for students to choose from in his AP Human Geography course as well as a general geography class that ends up being credit recovery for a number of students.

They create humorous and educational presentations with computer-generated characters in the Web-based program Xtranormal. They watch videos and other multimedia through Moodle. And they go on webquests that Miyashita created with the high school librarian.

Recently, he started giving students learning activities on Twitter and mixing in games in the spirit of the old Carmen Sandiego game.

In his AP class this year, Miyashita will have students drive the learning and create multimedia presentations with iMovie, Presi and podcast software to get them out of their comfort zone.

Over the last few years, he's gone through a graduate program in e-learning design and implementation. And he advises other educators to model the behaviors they want to see in their students.

"We've got to be a constant student in terms of trying to keep ourselves up to date with the different technologies and resources that are there and apply them in our classroom and be willing to change,"  Miyashita said.

In his classes, he emphasizes that students need to learn about global issues because they do impact our lives.

"At the end of the day, it's trying to open up kids to the rest of the world and kind of getting them outside of the bubble they live in."