Here is a report from the field taken from a comment from Robert Harrell this morning and thank you Robert. I am going to make a category for Geoguessr.com, not because it is one, but because it’s a quick way to find what you wrote about it if a teacher wants to remember the term “geo” and grab it for a lesson anytime, or bring it out in the middle of an observation even. I like that it aligns with Common Core and if you want to expand on exactly how it does that I am sure there would be many eyes on that topic (maybe we can get a comment thread going), since we now have to “prove” that we are aligning with CC. I can see some of our younger teachers memorizing what we say about how this particular activity aligns with CC and just snapping that information off in a short conversation with an administrator after a drop-in observation. That is the kind of zinger that ensures that at least that particular badge would never be back in that teacher’s classroom again all year!
Robert’s report:
“Today one of our Assistant Principals stopped by. She was very impressed with what was going on. I had gone to geoguessr.com, and the class was trying to figure out where in the world the place was that we were looking at. It was a great variant of Look and Discuss, and since you get points according to how close you come to the actual location, there was an element of competitiveness with my other classes. We had a lot of fun just hanging out in the language and defending why we thought that a place was in Canada or Australia or Russia or …
“When we had finished I pointed out to my students that the Group is smarter than the Individual. We started out with some pretty wild guesses, but as we looked at the picture and discussed, in most cases we came very close. One class actually landed about a quarter mile from one of the locations.
“Later when I went to thank the AP for stopping by, I explained a little bit more about what we were doing and pointed out how this aligns with Common Core (I’m teaching them to do a close reading of a non-verbal text) and is a Best Practice. My students enjoyed it, and some asked to do it again. I just have to guard against overkill.
Here is a March 18 update on this topic from Robert:
This afternoon our French teacher stopped by. She wanted to use geoguessr but something other than what I had showed my department came up. We fiddled with URLs on my computer for a few minutes and finally found what she had stumbled upon. It’s a different website that does a similar game but seems to emphasize urban areas a bit more (geoguessr does a lot that is definitely out in the country), scores differently (low score is better), and lets you see how you stack up against “most other people”. The other website is
http://www.earth-picker.com/