Most would agree John Steinbeck eloquently captures the soul-wrenching journey of a Depression-era family as they move from Oklahoma to California in The Grapes of Wrath. But today’s young readers often need more than words on a page to fully immerse themselves in a story — they need multimedia.
So imagine, instead, reading The Grapes of Wrath on an iPad, then pausing when the Joad family arrives at a Hooverville, bringing up a Google Earth satellite image of that exact location and tapping the screen to zoom in for the 3-D street view. Tap on yet another link and you could perhaps listen to some music from this era — think Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? or a Duke Ellington number.
“I want kids to really feel like they’re sitting in that car with the Joads, looking out the windshield, travelling with them — in that story, in that environment,” says Jerome Burg, a retired teacher from Livermore, Calif., and the creator of a program called Google Lit Trips, which was nominated for a prestigious Tech Award this past November.
It serves to create a more interactive reading experience, providing tools to help students follow a character’s journey, seeing what they might have seen, hearing what they may have heard along the way.
Burg, who is a Google-certified instructor, came up with the concept a couple of years after Google Earth launched in 2005. He started playing with the path tool that connects different place marks on a map and wrote the code for his first program, to accompany Voltaire’s Candide. A friend then suggested he set up a website and create a name for his project.
“I came up with Google Lit Trips because it was sort of a joke — like, ‘Hey, if you want to know more about Grapes of Wrath, you should Google Lit,’ ” Burg says. “No one gets it, though.”
And yet, plenty are getting the concept: More than 1,000 teachers, students and book nerds visit GoogleLitTrips.com every day to download free guides to their favourite novels, whether it’s for children (Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey), young adults (Underground to Canada by Barbara Smucker) or more advanced readers (The Odyssey by Homer).
With some basic knowledge of HTML, teachers can add their own images, audio files or text boxes — for example, there might be discussion starters at each landmark to encourage higher-level thinking.
“It’s more than just pinpointing things geographically,” Burg says. “It’s a three-dimensional process of reading and learning that helps students see literary places in real-life, up-close.”
Kevin Amboe, a technology consultant and former teacher from Surrey, B.C., met Burg a few years ago and created the Google Lit Trips for Hana’s Suitcase and Underground to Canada.
“With Hana’s Suitcase, I knew talking to children in Grades 5 and 6 about concentration camps would be a little rough,” he says. “So I decided to approach it from the geography. For instance, the mother is told to report to prison but has to walk 50 kilometres overnight to get there. When the kids look at the map, zoom in and virtually follow the character on that journey, they go, ‘Wow, that’s a long distance.’ It has a big effect.”
Some may argue all these technological accoutrements only serve to distract young readers further, instead of allowing them to focus on the text itself. But Burg, who admits to suffering from attention deficit disorder as an adult, insists this isn’t the case.
“The technology is enhancing the reading experience,” he says, “not replacing it. It’s prompting kids to do their own interpretation, not interpreting the book for them. But mostly, it’s about helping readers let go of where they’re sitting at the time and become immersed in the story.”
Amboe agrees: “Students who are sitting in class and playing with their cellphones probably wouldn’t be doing that if they were already on a computer interacting with a program like this.”
from: National Post
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