The Digital Palette: Exploring with Google Earth through Children and their Toys

Estimated reading time according to Read-O-Meter: 2m36s

A few weeks ago I visited an amazing collection of photographs recommended by Jennie Magiera on Twitter. The photographs were aesthetically stimulating and also provided an incredible amount of insight into the lives and experiences of others around the world from a variety of diverse locations. Soon after that, Jennie wrote a blog post about sharing the images with her students and the subsequent conversation had on Schoology.

I was inspired myself and made plans to share the photos with my 4th graders the next day. On a whim, I reached out to Jennie and we made plans to connect our students in a Google Hangout video chat to share our reflections together. My students were extremely interested in the photographs and could hardly contain their excitement during our video chat.

So what are these photographs?

Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti traveled around the world for 18 months and photographed children with their favorite toys. He titled the series, "Toy Stories". There are 34 different children (and locations) from five different continents. The photographs not only give insight into what children around the world play with, but also something of the children themselves as you see the child in their play space. Visit his site and see his Toy Stories collection.

After the first lesson, so many students wanted to know where these places were that they were seeing, so I went to Google Earth for help. Following the tutorial videos from Google, I was able to create a .KMZ file with the images and placemarks embedded in the file (click here to download the .KMZ file, then open it in Google Earth). When I saw my other 4th grade class the next week, the experience was dramatically different as they could not only browse through only the images, but they could browse the globe in Google Earth and click on the camera icon to see a child with their toys from that place.

Browsing the images in Google Earth

This allowed for two different conversations for my students, the images on their own versus the images on the map. It was easy when using the map to compare and comment on images from the same region of the world. Students had a variety of insights and reflections from taking in the images. Most were surprised that children everywhere had toys like their own. Many had a strong reaction to the variety of play spaces shown with each child. The most talked about photographs by far were the few that show children surrounded with toy guns as their favorites.

I did the activity with all of my 4th and 5th grade classrooms and tried a few different methods for an accompanying online conversation: Edmodo, TodaysMeet and Kidblog. Each method had it’s own pluses and minuses, and in all honesty the conversations that happened verbally with neighbors were more intriguing as it was everyone’s sudden reaction rather than a planned out written thought. But the online record provided an opportunity to hear from everyone for both myself as teacher and for all the other students.