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.
