Google Lit Trips

I'm still here at the ILC 2008 and I just attended a great session on Google Lit Trips. I was tempted to write about the session as it happened but I just couldn't bring myself to be quite that instantaneous. Jerome Burg gave the presentation and his website has a nice collection of lit trips that you can download and journey through with Google Earth. I was quite impressed with the huge variety of ways you can go with this type of learning experience. As you would expect, you can plot the different stops in your trip as well as add pictures, video, text, links, maps, overlays and much more. It has the power to truly bring your trip, and the book, to life. This same technology could be used to create a trip of a historical journey, migration patterns, travel logs and anything else you can imagine. In order to use these trips you need to have Google Earth (a free download) and then download the actual file for the trip you want to use. This file would need to be loaded on any machine where you want the trip used. Of course, once you become more familiar with the process of creating a trip, a topic that would take more than a single blog posting, you could create your own or, better yet, have your students collaborate on their own trips.