The Japan Tsunami was a result of an earthquake that scored a 9.0 on the Richter scale. I would have never thought that it could be used as a tool for education. It seemed to be such a catastrophic event and I could not get past the physical ramifications of the disaster itself.
EDUC 504 Teaching with Technology's assigned reading: Teaching Ideas: The Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan provided so many ideas for teaching.
What turned out to be the most influential was the before and after pictures. This interactive site allows you to drag from the left to the right an aerial picture of an area of Japan with a picture after the tsunami had passed.
The brightness was completely off, all the lush greenery was gone and replaced with darker shades of grey and green. There are 20 pictures on that site and they catalog the tsunami's effect on towns, cities, and even the nuclear power plants.I've realized that growing up all my life with technology, the most basic multimedia does not even seem "technology"-esque. Perhaps this is the loss that occurs with the current generation of teachers and their students with regards to their view of technology. Technology seems less a typewriter and more as a macbook pro to the students of 2011.
I was MESMERIZED by those slider photos. A great example to me of how there are times when photographs are amazing teaching tools!
ReplyDeleteAs with Kristin, I was amazed by these photos of devastation. I think these photos can do amazing things in the classroom. These photos can really help to make the students connect their lives to the lives of the people in Japan. Great primary sources will really grab the students attention and help the students to understand the the effects of a natural disaster. When I had technology like this in a lesson when I was in school, I know it helped me to really grasp what the teacher wanted me to understand and I could really hold on to all the other material that was being taught. Great idea to put these pictures in your blog, I need to figure out how to do that in my blog....
ReplyDeleteGreat post of photos. I'd like to see comparative pictures from WWII. Probably similar visuals, with obviously outdated infrastructure. Like Elizabeth said,these pictures might help capture a student's imagination in a way that articles and news might not. Seeing an area have to start from scratch provides a variety of opportunities to address development and sustainable growth.
ReplyDeleteI too thought the sliders were very compelling and something that could definitely have been used in a classroom lesson like this. Interesting point about pictures being technology - I think we do often classify technology in a certain way, forgetting about the things that came before it and were built upon. It reminds of Charlie's comments on what a text is: it is not just a book or an article, it can be a video, recording, or countless other things. I think technology needs to be viewed from a similar lens.
ReplyDeleteThose pictures do a great job of putting the effects of the tsunami's into perspective. I agree with Nadia, you make a very good point about not only the sliders being thanks to the work of technology, but the pictures themselves! After you pointed that out, I thought "man, how did they get those pictures?" Wicked stuff man, wicked stuff.
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