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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > September > 28 > Entry
Google as teacher
This all started when I caught my second grader watching Titanic on HBO.
I was about to shoo her away but the boat had just hit the iceberg and she was fascinated. She wanted to know how and why the boat sank. So I kept watching with her until it turned on it’s side, split in two and slid below the surface to the ocean floor.
When it was over, she looked at me and asked, “Can we Google the Titanic?”
So we did, and we found a lot of great stuff, including this video by an artist who is selling paintings of the sunken ship that he made in a submarine. Out the window he points us to the majestic ship in its shadowy underwater grave.
Back at school during her weekly library visit, she searched for, and found, a book about the Titanic. At home she read it to me and we learned, among other things, that the Titanic had two sister ships — the Olympic and the Britannic.
“What happened to the sister ships?” she asked me. “Are they still around?”
I had no idea.
“Can we Google them?”
I got my computer.
“Type in ‘Titanic sisters,’” she instructed.
At the top of the results was a site called Titanic & Her Sisters and for the next half-hour or so we read the amazing stories of the Britannic and the Olympic.
Both were commissioned into the British navy during World War I — The Olympic as a transport ship for British and American troops and the Britannic as a hospital ship to evacuate wounded soldiers.
All three sister ships had serious incidents at sea.
The Olympic was accidentally rammed off the English coast by a navy ship, but survived a gaping hole and was repaired. It sailed for 27 years until it was unceremoniously stripped and scrapped.
The Britannic was sunk by a mine or a torpedo off the coast of Greece and now sits at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
But the best story of all on the site was the story of Violet Jessop, who amazingly had been a stewardess on the Titanic when it sank and on the Olympic when it was rammed, and then was working as a nurse’s aide on board the Britannic when it sank. Incredibly, she survived the worst disasters of all three sister ships.
As I shut the computer down and sent my daughter to bed, I thought about how powerful the Internet can be as a teaching tool. Most of the time, it can answer questions a child has about almost anything. You can see pictures of a ship that sailed almost 100 years ago and even visit it at the bottom of the ocean by riding along with an enterprising artist.
The encyclopedias of my youth just can’t compare.
(Image credits: www.interet-general.info, www.google.com)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Comments
By Andrew Pass
September 30, 2006 10:57 AM | Link to this
I agree that in the future textbooks will be on-line with all kinds of fantastic links. But why wait until the future? Take a look at the wiki that I’ve set up on Current Events in Education. I add a different current event daily. Hopefully other people will help me add links. The address is: http://current-events-education.wikispaces.com/ Let me know what you think. Andy Pass http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.htmlBy Jeff O.
September 29, 2006 8:26 PM | Link to this
Agree with the previous poster. The Internet is vast but you gotta be more discriminating about the sources available.By Oldprof
September 29, 2006 4:36 PM | Link to this
I’m expecting that in the future, textbooks will be published as web pages full of links to selected resources in the public domain on the internet. There are already a number of outstanding sites, such as http://radicalacademy.com/philclassicindex.htm or http://www.artchive.com/ , that are doing so, essentially, though they’re not claiming to be e-texts.By Derwood
September 28, 2006 11:36 PM | Link to this
Agreed that much of what you find on Google or any other search engine can easily surpass any Encyclopedia. But, that also must be tempered with caution. There is a lot of bad information out there as well. Care must be taken when choosing the source. Multiple sources are almost always a good idea.