Planet Eye
Planet Eye is a web tool that allows users to access guides to several destinations around the world that include maps, photos, and reviews of those destinations. The site also features travel packs on certain destinations that offer a view into a certain theme or excursion highlighting geographically, culturally, and historically significant information. With a PlanetEye account, users can plan their own trips based on other user’s reviews and can even write their own reviews and upload photos from their recent travel experiences. There is also a blogging tool within the site and tools for personalization of information that users receive in relation to their travel interests (PlanetEye, 2008).
I think that PlanetEye has the potential to add a sense of exploration and discovery to the classroom by taking what might be a boring research project and bringing it to life. In the French courses that I took when I was a student, each year was the typical project where students would create a brochure about a French speaking country or destination. These projects where never really exciting and they did not produce much learning for me because I never remembered anything about any of the regions that I researched for my final projects. Instead, it meant hours of stressful library research into encyclopedias or boring travel books. PlanetEye takes the idea of a travel brochure project and brings it into the current technological culture and reaches more students through many of the different intelligences.
For use within the classroom, instructors can allow students to conduct research on various destinations while they access comments from real people who have actually visited these sites. The perspectives of the real-life travelers bring a more realistic understanding to these destinations. A project that I might use to integrate PlanetEye into my French courses would include having students use the information that they gather from PlanetEye to create online travel blogs of different locations in French speaking regions of the world. Also, since many of my students are very well traveled, they could write their own reviews of destinations that have visited in the past through PlanetEye.
References
PlanetEye. (2008). Help. Retrieved from http://main.planeteye.com/?page_id=41
Hey, Kim. This is really cool. I often use GoogleEarth to show students a glimpse of what life is like in the areas that we're studying, but I think I may start adding Planet Eye as well; it is much more intimate and adds elements of "real life" like food and pictures that are more than rooftops! Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThis is yet another tool that fits with your "Master Plan." Awesome:)
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