Fifth graders at Holladay Elementary have been studying the ocean floor in Science (SOL5.6), so today students in Ms. Haislip’s class created undersea tours with Google Earth and Screencastify. First we opened up Google Earth and I showed them how to put placemarks on the different features (continental plain, continental slope, continental rise, abyssal plain, trench, ridge, seamount, etc). I also demonstrated how they could go “underwater” and change the angle of the view by clicking and dragging the wheel in the top right corner. Once their view was just right, they clicked the yellow thumbtack button to add a labeled placemark on the spot. The placemarks appear in a list on the left side under “My Places.” When the students double-click a placemark from the list, Google Earth automatically takes them to that same view that was saved. Once all the placemarks had been created, it was time to record the tour using Screencastify. Screencastify is a Chrome extension that records the screen and lets you add an audio voiceover. Students worked with partners to “travel” around the ocean floor describing each feature. Screencastify saves the videos to Google drive, so it was easy to copy and paste the links from there to Google classroom. You can take a look at some of their projects here.
