Google Maps and Google Earth: Music Educator Review

     Google Maps and Google Earth are two Google tools that are available for teachers to utilize in their classrooms and have many features that make them desirable for classroom use. Google Maps is a web service that that provides road maps and information about geographical regions and sites worldwide (Zola, 2022). The most used feature of Google Maps is for navigating and finding the shortest and most convenient routes to a desired destination (Lande, 2019). Within Google Maps you can measure distances, download offline maps, drop pins in certain locations, save locations to lists and label them, and access a timeline of all places and routes the user has been to. Google Earth is a geomapping and tagging program that creates an interactive map of the Earth (Davis, 2019). Within Google Earth you can explore any place in the world including cities and landscapes, which you can then save into categories. 

        Google Maps is, at first glance, most useful for navigation, but can be used in the classroom setting to help digitize learning and add visualization to the learning process. One pro of using Google Maps is the ability for students to build maps of places they read about in stories or learned about in history for a visual representation of what it looked like. Another pro is that maps can be shared and worked on by multiple people, making it a great tool for collaboration (Sode, 2019). A con of Google Maps is that it does not have many extra resources for education like Google Earth has. Another con is that it is not as visually clear and detailed as Google Earth for exploring. Students can use Google Maps in the classroom to build maps and routes where they can create lines, customizable points of interest, and make notes (Sode, 2019). 

    Google Earth is a useful tool for educators as it helps their students to develop technology skills, geographic knowledge, and spatial thinking (Patterson, 2007). It allows the opportunity of exploring anywhere on Earth in the comfort of the classroom and gives students a chance to explore in a dynamic and interactive manner while also engaging in spatially-oriented learning in an entertaining manner (Patterson, 2007). The biggest pro of using Google Earth in the classroom is that is a visually entertaining way for students to learn about the world. Other pros are the 3D capabilities that make exploring even more interesting, the ability to save locations to view later, and the extreme detail. Two cons of Google Earth are that it requires Internet access and needs a high bandwidth to operate well (Patterson, 2007). Students may not be able to utilize the features of Google Earth from their homes if they do not have these things, and even some schools will not be able to support the high bandwidth. 

    Music is a universal language. It is something that connects people worldwide no matter where you are from or what language you speak. Using Google Maps and Google Earth helps your students understand visually the vastness and diversity of this world and how important music really is in relation to that. One way to use Google Maps in the music classroom is to have students explore musical venues, such as symphony halls and opera houses, and map out routes that connect them in different countries or states. You could allow student choice in asking them what kind of performance they would like to go see and where they would like to see it, and then have them map out a route to those places. For example, a student would like to see the Philadelphia Orchestra and then visit Broadway, they can create a map with notes about why they would like to go there and what they would like to see performed. One way to use Google Earth is to explore the homes and countries of different composers. You can use it to map out where the composers lived at certain points in their lives when they wrote specific pieces or where they traveled to to perform their works. Students can choose one composer and create a list of important places in that composer's life: where they were born, where they died, where they went to school, and where they performed or where their works were performed. Google Maps and Google Earth are useful tools for music educators to help expand their student's knowledge of the world around them and to connect it to the musical world. 

References

• Davis, M. (2019, May 1). How Does Google Earth Work? Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/65504-google-earth.html
• Lande, P., Kanani, P., & Mehta, H. (2019, May). Google Maps. International Journal of Computer Applications. 178(8), 41-46. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pratik-   Kanani/publication/333117435_Google_Maps/links/5eb6cc7da6fdcc1f1dcb10aa/Google-Maps.pdf 
• Patterson, T. (2007, December 6). Google Earth as a (Not Just) Geography Education Tool. Journal of    Geography. 106(4), 145-152. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221340701678032
• Sode, M. (2019, August 14). How Google Maps Can Be Used Educationally.    MapsPeople. https://blog.mapspeople.com/how-google-maps-can-be-used-educationally
• Zola, A. (2022, September). Google Maps. Tech    Target. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/Google-Maps