MICAH SHIPPEE: My name is Dr. Micah Shippee.
I'm a social studies teacher at Liverpool Middle School.
When I was growing up, digital technology was in its infancy.
Today, students have much more engaging
content available to them very easily
on their own personal devices.
Now the challenge for me in my classroom
is to teach students critical skills where they take content
that's readily accessible and craft something meaningful
to them and to their world.
I know that those critical skills
are going to travel with them throughout their life,
no matter what digital tools they have access to.
Those are the skills that are going to last.
It is our job to prepare our students for a future
that we do not entirely understand.
We want to give them the skills so that, in the future,
they can make the world a better place.
Today, we're going to be working on our Google Earth project.
AUDIENCE: Yay!
Yeah, whoo.
SPEAKER 1: If I had to do it all written down,
I feel like I'd get bored.
Doing it on the computer, it's easier to understand,
and it makes it more fun learning about it, too.
It's just better.
MICAH SHIPPEE: Education has had a long standing relationship
with technology.
We, as educators, have always changed with it,
and we can't stop now.
Open the project up, label it with the title
of your research.
Later on, we'll bring them all together.
My students know that, if I ask them
how they do something with their technology,
that I really want to know.
I'll watch students with workflow solutions
that I hadn't thought of that would save me
three clicks on a website.
And I say, hey, show me how you did that.
And then I'll highlight that for other students
throughout the rest of the day.
And that way, the students and I are connecting on two fronts.
One, we're growing from each other, and two,
they're recognizing that I have an interest in their lives
and what they do and not assuming that what I do
is better.
I like that image.
That's nice.
That looks really good.
And so did you trace out the whole lake?
SPEAKER 2: I did.
MICAH SHIPPEE: OK.
So then, you're going to have some information
on the right hand side explaining
what that red line is.
That's excellent.
Let me help.
Let's do this.
We just have to move the file.
So it looks like your device might be frozen.
Is that a problem?
Students get to see me fail.
They get to see a teacher or an adult try something new,
not perfectly polished because I haven't seen it before.
And in fumbling through new technology,
students are seeing rigor.
They're seeing perseverance and resilience, which
I believe have to be taught.
In that growth and that journey, we get connected together.
I think it's very important for students
to feel part of something.
I'm giving you guys these for your efforts.
It's appropriate to be excited and to cherish it forever
and always.
MARK POTTER: Micah's classroom is
a very successful representative model
of what we look for when we tried to figure out,
how do we embed technology into what students need to know
and be able to apply moving forward
throughout their high school career,
and then, obviously, into the world.
MICAH SHIPPEE: My students are already attracted
to these emergent tools.
Now I want to help them to use them in a meaningful way.
Today, we're working on a Google Earth project.
Right in our community, we have a freshwater lake
that we can't drink the water out of.
We have to pipe in freshwater from lakes
that are miles and miles away.
That's the result of poor decisions in our past,
in our local history.
In our Google Earth project, we're
exploring what was done to our lake
so that we can understand how we shouldn't allow something
like that to happen again.
For this project, the first thing we did is discuss,
what's a good question to ask?
How might we deliver content about our local community
to people outside of our local community?
Then we started to look for data.
So we collected primary sources, really old,
crusty books that we have.
We took a mini field trip.
We walked down to the lake.
We collected water samples right at the shores.
We took a lot of photos, a lot of videos,
and we captured some 360 Street View data, as well.
What we can do is, when we look at our map,
we have noticed that there's a couple of points
along the lake that is not on Google Street View.
So we can walk and take pictures with the phone.
Then we came back to the classroom,
and we went right to the Google Earth project page.
And in our Google Earth projects,
we could upload our photos that we took.
We could find our Street View 360s that we had taken
and start to write and compose our story.
Our focus today is to wrap up our collaborative project,
so that students can present to each other in class.
SPEAKER 3: My group did a project
on the water quality of Onodaga Lake.
This is Onodaga Lake.
Sewage plants dumped raw and partially treated sewage
into the lake.
Fishing was banned, and no one was allowed to swim.
SPEAKER 4: To be able to see the finished product, after all
that hard work, is very fulfilling.
SPEAKER 5: It makes me feel a little bit smarter that I
can share this with people, maybe
make them interested to start their new project
about their corner of the world.
SPEAKER 6: I think it's important because maybe someone
lives in some town far away from here, and they have a lake.
And there's factories around it, starting to pollute it.
And they can learn about this and stop it before it happens.
MICAH SHIPPEE: We want to say, look at where we were.
Look at how we got there.
Look at what we've done.
There's hope for you, too, in your communities.
MARK POTTER: Micah's ability to engage students and really
attract students into thinking about history
and thinking about social studies
in a context that's much different than a traditional
social studies teacher--
kids love to come there because they don't really
know what to expect.
And it's an attraction from a perspective of,
I wonder what it's going to be like today.
And I think that's a real curiosity kids have,
especially at the middle school level.
MICAH SHIPPEE: When I first started my career,
my students would create something with pen and paper
or with crayons and markers, and we would put it up
on the walls of the school for the school
to see and to appreciate.
Now, my students are preparing media
that has a global audience, where they have likes,
followers, and subscribers internationally,
which is a huge audience.
The students are really proud of their work.
They're basically building a website
that can be shared by anyone around the world.
This is not just built for our little school community.
This is built for anyone on the planet to view and gain from.
SPEAKER 7: The project makes me feel
that I am part of something bigger than myself
because it's helping not just our school
and our everyday life, but it's helping our community.
MICAH SHIPPEE: I'm amazed at when I provide my students
with a little bit of ambiguous directions, what
they do with it.
SPEAKER 7: He's a good teacher.
He helps us understand things, even if it's a hard concept.
But he makes it a fun, fun way to learn.
MICAH SHIPPEE: Many students take the ball
and run with new technology, and find ways of using it
that I couldn't even imagine.
And I'm excited to continue to learn with them, as they
show me how to apply new tools.
For me, it's really powerful for students to tell me,
through their action, that what I'm doing
for them is making meaning.
And that it matters.
And when it matters to them, it helps
me to be a better teacher.
It inspires me to do more.
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