Last week I spoke with one of the MS Humanities teachers at UNIS about their upcoming unit on Africa. Back in the US, I taught two semester-long courses on Africa, one on East Africa and one on West Africa, so it’s a subject that I know a bit about and is also dear to my heart. I’ve been working on lots of map-based lesson ideas recently, so I spoke to him about possibly using a website that I’ve been working on, http://www.mapeverything.org. The idea for the site is to give students, teachers, travelers, and others a place to put various types of Google Maps that they have created; some of the maps there are collaborative, while others are not. My vision for it is to create a ‘Wikipedia of Maps’ where people can contribute to different types of maps about all sorts of subjects.
Initially, I had just thought that I could help enhance a map-based activity that the class was already doing. Instead, the teacher offered to let me come in and teach a class on map-based activities related to Africa, either this coming Friday or early the following week. I decided to use this class as an opportunity to flesh out my final project for Course 1 of COETAIL, and this is what I came up with:
To begin, I will show students images from washingtonpost.com in the slideshow below. We will discuss the themes that the images depict, and assumptions about what life in Africa is like.
Next, we will look at a few images from http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/. We’ll find images that students can connect to, that remind them of things that they have seen before. Then, I’ll show them the map from www.mapeverything.org called Comparative Images of Africa, seen below. As a class, we’ll locate one of the images chosen and insert it into the map of Africa, and also provide an attribution for the image.
I’ll ask the students to look for similar, familiar images at www.flickrcc.net or similar, Creative Commons, image archives. When they find an image is found, they will insert it at the same point on the map of Africa and give it a similar attribution.
Finally, we’ll talk about some of the connections that we have made between the different images. We’ll compare the images that we chose with the washingtonpost.com images that we began with.
To see the Google Doc of the lesson plan, click here.
2 thoughts on “Final project for COETAIL Course 1: Comparative Images of Africa”
Hi Paul
This is a great project as the world is certainly having to face their prejudice and misunderstandings about the huge and great nation of Africa.
If you continue on with the theme of maps, have you looked at the Google Earth project? Google Earth is a free download and students can “fly in” and tour parts of the world. They can even make their own tours with their photo images as “photo pins” on their map.
Here is a link to something linked with Africa, but I’m sure there are many out there:
http://www.southafrica.net/za/en/page/static/general-copy-southafrica.net-google-earth-south-africa-on-google-earth
Love the use of images to inspire learning and thinking here! Also love the collaborative map idea – we’ve done something similar at YIS and being able to navigate around the map while researching is really effective. Looking forward to hearing about the outcome of this lesson!