Maps

This was a really fun assignment!  The 5th graders in our school take a field trip to Washington D.C every year.  There are so many great places for kids to visit in Washington D.C, so it was fun to plan and imagine.

It was easy to do.  You start here with google maps.  

It's easy to search for places and add them to your map.  The feature that I really liked was that there was often a website linked in the site information box that you are able to click on.  If I shared this map with students they would be able to access information about the site they are visiting very easily.

I also created an interactive itinerary document.  Students can work on this throughout the field trip or begin to explore the sites and access information before they leave on the field trip.  I used google docs to create this document.  Again, it was pretty easy as many of the features are very similar to Word documents.  I was able to insert pictures of the places they are visiting as well as links to all the places they are visiting.  If you use google classroom you could just share this document with students for them to begin working on it.

Here's a link to my itinerary document.

It would be interesting to have students create their own map of the places they visit in the order they visit each site and share it with the teacher.  It would also be a convenient way to keep track of everybody ;-).

As far as the SAMR model.  Creating a document in google is so similar to creating a Word document it would just be considered a substitution.  You might be able to consider it augmentation because sharing the document with students and giving them an assignment is easier.

Creating maps and sharing them students before a field trip would be considered redefinition.  Paper maps were not able interactive or provide facts and information.  Google maps provides links to websites so that you can access information on the site before you visit.