Tech Club Visit Number 3

At the beginning of the class the group gathered six students (one for each computer) and had them type in virtual piano (www.virtualpiano.com) for ten minutes.  Afterwards I gave a very brief (less than five minutes) introduction to Google earth and demonstrated the cool things you can find in Google earth by showing a sunken ship and their school.  The students then each went to a computer and looked at various iconic cities and cultural buildings in both street view and earth view.  After correctly finding and identifying 8 places on Google earth the students were shown Google mars and Google moon.  For the last ten minutes the students were allowed to look at what their wanted on Google earth.
The technology worked very well, the kids all knew how to use Google earth just fine.  The problem came in that some of the group did not know how to use Google earth as well as the kids or some of the other instructors.  Some kids also did not want to look at things but only want to go to the bottom of the ocean and "walk across the Pacific ocean."  Which was fine, but learning didn't really occur.  So the students were persuaded to do other things on Google earth, like street view in Venice.  There weren't really learning objectives set which I would say is a big problem this group faces.  But we don't want to stress students who are already stressed from a long day of class which make sense.
I really liked doing a Google earth scavenger hunt (essentially what it was), I just want some form of learning objectives at the end of the day.  It was difficult to understand the purpose of using Google earth as a teaching device if there was no objective.  It did build student knowledge of where in the world various cities are and through teaching them we were able to build knowledge of places like Europe and where the France is.  I would make learning objectives a priority and do a short summative assessment such as each student finding one place on Google Earth such as the Pacific Ocean, Antarctica  Europe, Greenland, Asia, Mt. Everest, etc.  Also, as always some more instruction on the purpose behind virtual piano would be useful.  But that was improved upon and I think it went better this week.