Teachers at Huntington High School are combining GigaPan technology with West Virginia history to engage students and help them understand the unique culture that surrounds them.
Coal and coal mining in West Virginia has had perhaps the biggest impact on shaping the history and now the future of our state. Coal is found in 53 of its 55 counties with 43 of them having minable reserves. Even though coal has played such an important role in developing WV and the future of our state depends on its use as an alternative fuel, few WV students know much about it. School teachers from Cabell County are embarking on a unique project this summer to develop the skills necessary to bring place-based curricula dealing with WV coal to their own classes. These teachers traveled throughout West Virginia utilizing GPS, scientific probeware, blogs, still/video cameras, and a host of software to develop a "virtual Tour" to many of the mining sites, both past and present, that have helped shape our WV history. Cabell county teachers learned about deep coal mining, surface mining, stream run-off, and the history of coal mining in general during their trip.
Below is a video created by Josh Ratliff showing how GigaPan was used to document historical sites in West Virginia history.
Marshall University's June Harless Center trained a group from University College to capture GigaPan images for the freshman convocation that took place on August 18th. Numbers on Convocation are not final however, turnout was estimated comparable to last year with 1800-1850 freshman students attending Convocation.( Please note, this is not the entire freshman class.)
In addition, Dr. Harold Blanco of the College of Education introduced new Marshall faculty to GigaPan technology and how to integrate it into their curriculum. Departments included theatre, social work, math, education and pharmacy to name a few.
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/0fbad529486d429daddc3cf761663003/
Check out the movie trailer we made for our project year in review! We will be presenting a BYOL (bring your own laptop) and poster session at this year's ISTE conference.
Come see us and the CREATE Lab in Philadelphia!3rd and 5th grade students utilized GigaPan technology to learn about Brazil and other cultures in their " World of Diversity Project". They took GigaPans, made diary entries, Venn diagrams, and acrostic poems during the course of the semester.
A collection of resources from the Arts & Bots MSP.