Parkland Place Based Shared Map Project Outcomes Report
Parkland has had a lot of fun with our shared Map making project this school year. We enjoyed the opportunity to learn a lot more about Maps in general, and specifically, Google MyMaps, collaborating with many different classes, as well as many fun opportunities to get out into our local environment and explore the beautiful nature that surrounds our Saanich Peninsula.Our project involved a core team of Erin Stinson, Aaron Mueller and Shannon Crawford as we worked throughout the school year with different classes, groups and events to try and continually add to our Shared Google MyMap.
Our key goals for this project were to involve the Geography classes at Parkland, as well as Marine Science classes, our Outdoor Education classes and our local Indigenous community. We specifically also tried to include our Indigenous Education team, our Indigenous students and local community Elders to try and continue working on the map to find ways to capture the local place names, as well. We still have grand ambitious plans for our map and look forward to continuing our work on this map year after year.
The curricular goals for this project were to teach students about Map making, layers of maps, perspectives on maps and ways to use digital maps to teach about the local environment. We also wanted to teach our students about important places around our environment and to raise awareness about issues related to our local environment.
We have designed this project and map to live beyond this year and to continue to keep growing and developing as we include more classes, more events and more layers. Our goal is to continue evolving, adapting and growing our map to be a living artifact as a part of our school community.
To the left (and below on our embedded map), you can see some of the specific layers of the map we are building, including:
- Biology Layer
- Geography Layer
- Indigenous Layer
- SD63 Schools Layer
- Marine Science Layer
- Community Events (Beach Cleanup) Layer
- Favourite Places Layer
Using and collaborating with Google MyMaps has been relatively simple and straightforward. Our district uses the G-Suite set of tools and this integrated very well with Google MyMaps. We were able to create and share the main Map with classes using Google Classroom, which kept the sharing and collaborating easy. Google MyMaps allows you to centre your personalised map on one key area, and add as many unique layers over top of your base layer. You can use Satellite imagery, topography maps, or other unique perspectives of the Saanich Peninsula.
We did some instruction on how to access the map, how to add points of interest, upload photos, and add shapes and locations to our map. Overall, this tool was quite easy to implement and we focused on only a few key simple features.
We hope to continue to add new layers and more perspectives that will be captured on the map, as well as involve more classes, more groups, more trips, events and local indigenous knowledge.
Our final version of the map for this school year is below. It is still a work in progress, but it is a great demonstration of the capabilities, opportunities and progress we have made this year.
As well, we have one final video from our last outdoor event of the year, a Beach Cleanup session where we took a few classes to our local beach and cleaned up a whole pile of plastic, garbage, cigarette butts, foam and even an old tire. In the video below, we practised using the GoPro cameras, capturing footage of our walk and clean up.
During this last lesson, we taught some students some of the basics of using the GoPros, transferring media over to the Macbooks, loading up the media into iMovie and then doing basic editing, speeding up clips, adding some music and publishing our final videos!
Some of the biggest challenges we faced in this project was time. We were always behind where we wanted to be. To start, we had to wait for 2 whole months (Sept and Oct) to even receive our equipment to begin working with the classes. Our SD63 IT department is not staffed enough to facilitate these grants and it was quite a frustrating start to the project.
As well, we had challenges in getting Teachers of different subject areas we were working with to give up their precious classroom time to our project as they had important curriculum that needed to be covered.
Finally, it was a challenge for us to connect and support more participation from our local Indigenous population as communication and collaboration were difficult to organise and implement.
All that being said, we are feeling this was a very valuable project that is just getting started. It was always meant to be a multi-year project and one that we would build upon year after year. This collaborative map is a project that keeps on giving and we hope to add more and more layers to our Parkland Place Based Map for many years to come.
Our key recommendations for teams looking to create a similar project would be to start early, involve as many classes as possible and collaboratively plan as a teacher group to set aside student work time. Work smarter with tools like Google MyMaps which allows you to share and collaborate on one map together, enabling the co-creation and shared perspectives on your local environment. Create backup copies of your maps in case anything gets accidentally deleted or lost. Always back up your captured footage and media so that you can re-access anything that may have been lost or misplaced.
