Our Philosophy

Geography is an incredibly visual subject to learn and to teach. No matter how well you describe the layout of a continent, for example, it’s always better to see it in order to understand. Luckily, by integrating technology into lessons, there are many ways for teachers to make the world a more accessible, more understandable place.

One way to do this is by incorporating elements of a flipped classroom, so that students are able to spend some time at home grasping important concepts or big ideas at their own pace. They then come to class ready to participate in an activity with several hands-on, visual elements, under the guidance of their teacher.

In our lesson, for example, you can see how the dissemination of general facts about human population is given in an easily digestible way through our mini-lecture. Once students have absorbed this information, they use class time to figure out how to take those facts and make them meaningful by creating their own maps, with the teacher’s direct supervision and knowledge available.

Now that the flipped classroom has been established, screencasts could be introduced to the lesson. Screencasts essentially combine the audio of the educator’s voice with a live demonstration of how to navigate the website, powerpoint or slides the students are trying to learn about. For our lesson we chose the National Geographic Mapmaker because it fosters critical thinking amongst students as they choose what to include on the map - what to focus on as they make the decision of what they think is the most important.

These videos exist forever and can be shared amongst colleagues, and reviewed at any time by students. Moreover, teachers can use simple tools to film or record themselves and be as creative with these resources as they want. Lessons can range from a simple lecture format, where the teacher speaks directly into their camera, to more animated, visually stimulating clips.

Our ultimate goal is to give students access to information with clear instructions, and the added benefit of being able to watch at any time, in any place, at any volume and as many times as they need to. Flipped classrooms, screencasts, and interactive websites are also some of the best ways get students to work collaboratively because they are able to study together, as well as help each other to communicate their understanding of the concepts. The more we get our students to be comfortable interacting with these online tools, the more we can empower them to use these technological resources to help them succeed.

• You are nowhere without Geography!