Five+Themes+of+Geography

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**Welcome to Abbey and Terry's Five Themes of Geography page!**

//**Introduction**//  This project will take place in Abbey's 7th grade social studies classroom. This inquiry project is going to relate to the teaching of location, which is a concept that is highly abstract and very often misunderstood by 7th graders. The goal of this project is to make this concept more concrete for my students by relating it to their real lives. We’ve created five steps to scaffold their understanding. In step one, they will individually and collectively depict their world in terms of images, their own drawings, and text. In step two, students will extend their understandings to consider multiple possible answers to the question, “Where are you from? In step three, students will answer the question, “Where are you from?” by creating their own GoogleMaps narrative. In the final step, students will focus on synthesis by proposing answers to the following questions, “Why might understanding my present location help me today? How might this understanding be useful in the future?” The synthesis of ideas will then be portrayed in student-created short videos.

**How can students use technology tools in order to demonstrate understanding of location as related to their own lives and share this understanding with their sister school in China and multiple partners around the world? ** = =
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**//Website//** Click [|here] to view our project website!

**//North Carolina Standard Course of Study//** **1.01** Create maps, charts, graphs, databases, and models as tools to illustrate information about different people, places and regions in Africa, Asia, and Australia. **1.02** Generate, interpret, and manipulate information from tools such as maps, globes, charts, graphs, databases, and models to pose and answer questions about space and place, environment and society, and spatial dynamics and connectio ns.

**//Objectives//** -Using GoogleMaps, students will be able to create a multimedia project that demonstrates knowledge of location. -Using a blog, students will be able to explain the main idea of their projects as well as determine how understanding location will help them now and in the future. -Students will be able to evaluate their final projects against a peer critique rubric. -Students will be able to evaluate other students' work using a peer critique rubric. -Using a blog, students will be able to answer guiding questions that will spark dialogue amongst their peers. -Using a blog, students will be able to collaborate with their classmates as well as with students in various locations around the world. -Students will create videos that will depict the importance of understanding location and will share these videos on the web.

-What will we contribute as a new literacies teacher leaders? We will offer our students a new way to collaborate among themselves and globally using our class blog. We will also give students the opportunity to synthesize their understandings of location using GoogleMaps and video creation. We're modeling a connection between the university and a public school setting. We will share this collaboration with our colleagues and involve both the local and global communities.

media type="custom" key="4109785" [|Abbey's Sample Project] [|Google Maps]