I'm feeling left out... there's an edublogger meme thing going around and I haven't been tagged yet! Participants blog about five things others probably don't know about them and then tag five friends to carry on this meme. See Kathy Schrock's list or Andy Carvin's for examples. UPDATE: Midge felt sorry for me and tagged me, but this project is still on!
With my meme, I am going to morph this tradition a bit and do it with Google Earth! During the last week, a group of Apple Distinguished Educators have posted New Year's resolutions in Google Earth. This started after David Wallace compiled podcast holiday greetings from various ADEs. Ken Tuley and I aggregated placemark files from Google Earth and sent the resulting .kmz file back to the ADE community. It has been fun to "fly" to everyone's locations around the world and inspiring to read their resolutions. I would post it here, but for privacy reasons, I am not going to right now. To add to the power of this activity, Tim Lauer demonstrated for me yesterday via iChat how to make a Google Map mashup of this .kmz file and it was simply a jaw dropping moment for me. Using this proejct as inspiration, I am going to try and learn how to do that with the following activity.
Here is what I have posted in the Google Earth Community:
I am a teacher in Chicago, Illinois and am starting a Google Earth meme. This is a way to pay tribute to teachers who have made a difference in the lives of others and to share memorable learning experiences around the world. Also, I am curious about how learning happens for others and the characteristics of effective teachers. Feel free to morph the following questions and join in if you'd like! Anyone is welcome to participate, but I'd especially like to hear from students and educators
For this project, I am choosing two questions and you can answer just one or both:
1) What has been your most memorable learning experience?
2) Who is the teacher that has influenced you the most?and why?
Here are the technical directions. Feel free to edit as you pass this on:
To create a placemark describing your most memorable teacher or learning experience:
1) Open Google Earth.
2) Fly to the address of your choice. This is the point where you will add a placemarks. It should be your work address or home address, whatever you feel comfortable with.
3) Go to the Add menu and select Add Placemark.
4) Drag the new Placemark to the exact location of your address.
5) Edit fields as necessary. Label the placemark with your name. Put your written text in the description field. Add an url to anything you think might be relevant such as your website or blog. You can change the style and color of the placemark if you wish
6) When you are done, right click or control click on the placemark and select the email option from the file menu. Email it to me, Lucy Gray <elemenous@gmail.com>. I will compile all the .kmz files and post the most recent updates on my blog: [url=http://lucygray.org.]http://lucygray.org.[/url]
7) OPTIONAL: Upload the .kmz file to your blog if you have one. Add a relevant tag so that it can be found in a Technorati search. Possible tags could be meme, GoogleEarthmeme, or teachermeme.
Here is my entry:
I am tagging 10 people to get this started as I am not sure how many people really have the time and inclination for this....you only have to tag 5 others to pass it on! Here are my victims: Craig Cunningham Lisa Harrison Tim Lauer Meredith Melragon Ken Tuley Westley Field Valerie Becker Alexander Russo Will Dix Tim Tyson
