At first I had a great idea to create a Lit Trip for Woody Guthrie's Riding in My Car. I thought this would be perfect to go along with the trip in the story as they stop at many iconic american landmarks. I was going to create a basic one with each of the points labeled and plotted and have the students tell me what images we should add to each to fit in with the Social Studies curriculum. As students visited each place on the Lit Trip, I would have them do some research that we would add to the hot spots. It would be a second grade shared research project. However, the teachers have already taught this unit this year and although it would be nice for next year I wanted to be able to apply it to something that I was currently doing.
I decided to use the book The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal by Cheryl Harness instead because I am currently developing a unit in collaboration with a 4th grade teacher. In addition, I also teach The Amazing Impossible Erie Canal with my Battle of the Books team. So, as you can imagine I was very excited about the possibility this tool could offer.
I started off by watching the tutorials on YouTube that were posted on the Wiki. I then download GoogleEarth to my Mac. It looked slightly different than the one in the video, but I was able to figure it out. I started building my Lit Trip with minor struggles and often needed to refer back to the tutorials. However, in the middle of work it shut down completely and I lost all my work. This happened twice so I got a little smarted and decided I was going to save more often. Then it occurred to me that this is what happened the last time I started building a Lit Trip. I was determined to overcome this issue and keep plugging away and be good about saving. It does help if you create a story board ahead of time, like suggested in the tutorials, that way if the program quits you at least have all your writing saved in your Word Document.
As I continued building, I started rethinking my purpose for this tool. I originally thought I would build the trip with the points set out and then the students would individually be able to add to it. I realized very quickly that this wouldn't be an option. My other thought was that the students would build their own Lit Trips, however, I consider my self pretty savvy and I was struggling with the tool. Again, I didn't want to "toss the idea out the window" because the benefits of the tool seem so powerful. My next thought was that all the kids have IPADs. I started asking myself all sorts of questions: "Is this something that they can even use on the IPADS?" "Is it going to be more intuitive or less intuitive than the computer version?" So, I began researching and exploring.
When exploring the options for the IPAD, I started off getting very excited that there was a free app for Google Earth, which I installed. I was then able to find directions for uploading my Google Lit Trip to the IPAD. The process was very simple. You access "maps" though your Google account and upload the Lit Trip that was saved on your computer. Then you go into the app, which requires you to sign into your Gmail account. Once you are logged in you should be able to go to "my maps" and it should be there. Unfortunately, mine was not there and I have no luck getting them to appear.
I decided that I was going to give-up on using Google Earth to make Lit Trips and decided to use the Maps app that is available through our Google Accounts at school. This much simpler and very intuitive. The 2 downfalls that I noticed was that you aren't able to format your text as nicely and I haven't found away to make it like a movie, which you can do in Google Earth. The students have to individually push on each of the hot spots. The nice thing is that you can share it and the students can add to it, which makes it collaborative. You could give students the task of adding hot spots to key locations, which would be a great learning and/or assessment tool.
My next concern was that I wanted these maps to be interactive so that students can drop points on the map, add pictures and comment on discussion questions. I found that when I shared it with the students that they weren't able to make an individual copy of the map. I was able to figure out a way to have them download the map add it back to their maps, in which they could then interact with their own copy and send it back to me. That was a great solution for on the computer, but I wasn't able to figure out how to make a copy as nicely on the IPAD's. Although, I think it is possible by saving the map to the students drives, it is way to many steps and there are lots of roadblocks along the way, like pop-up blockers.
After a long tedious process, I was able to complete a Lit Trip using the Google Map app in our Google suite. I will definitely be using this on the computers with our 4th grade students. However, I am not sure that I am ready to do it on the IPADs yet. My advice to anyone looking make a Lit Trip is that if you want a movie Lit Trip to use in a center that does not need to be interactive and collaborative, it would be worth venturing into Google Earth. However, if you want the students to create maps or interact with maps that you create, I would use Google Maps.
Below is my original Lit Trip that I started building on Google Earth, followed by my final Lit Trip that I created using Google Maps:
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