Google Maps must surely be changing the way we use maps – especially now that it offers “Street View” for several countries. Street View allows you to see what the streets actually look like, thanks to a Google car driving around lots of cities and photographing almost every street at intervals of every few yards. It also offers language learning new immersive opportunities.
A Street View of Madrid is embedded below, so you can click on it and drag the image around to take a look.
In today’s lesson with a student from Madrid, he showed me around parts of the city using this Street View function. Ruben gave me directions to guide me and then described the locations.
Because the photos were taken with a camera fitted in a Google car, there are set routes along which you can “walk” along the city. The white arrows and line (marked with red circle in the picture below) show where you can walk along. In most cities this is almost any street you can get a car down. The arrow keys take you along these lines and allow you to spin around on the spot. There is also a zoom function to get a closer look.
At Avatar Languages we are making more use of this in lessons – there are a lot of ways it can be used and it makes an interesting alternative to a 3D virtual world such as Second Life. There are no avatars, so you can’t actually meet anyone using Google Maps Street View, but you can share your exact location and even your exact view using the link function (as marked with a red rectangle in the above image).
In other lessons the students have done matching tasks using information from real websites (such as matching restaurant descriptions from Lonely Planet’s site and pictures from Google Image searches) and then done some analytical work with the short texts. The below screenshot shows this matching exercise using the online whiteboard Dabbleboard.
Students then go and visit the locations using Google Maps Street View and are able to describe the surroundings of the restaurant. A similar task is to use property descriptions and photos from online property agents and then visit the neighborhoods to discuss the location and talk about what the student thinks about it.
Street View is very easy to use – go to the map of a city in the countries with Street View (not all country maps have this function – currently it’s USA, Japan, Spain, Italy, France; UK to follow soon). Then drag the yellow avatar (see top left corner of map above) to where you want to visit on the map. Alternatively the balloons offer Street View by clicking on the little photo. The map then shrinks to the bottom right corner.
Although it seems right to say that it’s “almost as good as being there”, from a language lesson’s perspective it is better! We can now “visit” places while taking lots of supporting resources (namely, the internet!) – all from the comfort of your home, office or wherever you are.
Btw, Google has created an explanatory video…
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on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 10:24 pm and is filed under ACTIVITIES, AUTHOR: HOWARD VICKERS, TECHNOLOGIES.
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4 Responses to “Google Maps Street View for Language Learning”
Update: The UK has now been added to Google Maps list of countries, so you can virtually visit places like Oxford now… http://tinyurl.com/googlemaps-oxford
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March 19th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Update: The UK has now been added to Google Maps list of countries, so you can virtually visit places like Oxford now… http://tinyurl.com/googlemaps-oxford
March 22nd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
[...] Google Maps Street View to allow students to visit real cities online and describe their virtual surroundings. [...]
April 20th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
[...] Google Maps Street View for Language Learning [...]
July 6th, 2009 at 3:44 am
[...] Google Maps Street View for Language Learning [...]