Project History

May 27, 2010 – a night that has gone down in history as “Oh, What A Night…” thanks to a blog post by Ann Clements, Associate Professor of Music Education at Penn State.  Ann is one of four faculty members selected for the Penn State 2010 TLT Faculty Fellowship, an effort to encourage faculty in the area of Teaching & Learning with Technology to develop new and innovative applications of technology to enhance student learning.  May 27th was the first night that all the fellows came together for dinner.  Ann was sitting across the table from Laura Guertin, Associate Professor of Earth Science.  The two started a casual conversation about maps, world music, and the struggles music teachers face in the classroom trying to bring the global context to the discussion.

As Laura was driving home from dinner, she had some ideas and wrote her own blog post.  Why can’t Laura’s knowledge of Google Earth be integrated with Ann’s knowledge of world music?  So Laura went back to her campus (Penn State Brandywine) and drafted the beginnings of two Google Earth exercises complete with embedded images and audio files.  Laura and Ann met again in mid-June and reviewed the sample files.  They discussed how best to modify the files to be most effective in the classroom and were excited to continue with the project.  Ann recommend that her graduate student, Teri Yerger, would be an excellent consultant for the project (as she has experience in the middle school music classroom), and Laura knew that an undergradute student from her campus, Labanya Mookerjee, would bring the technical skills and attention to details.

Labanya and Teri began their collaboration via email and phone.  Teri would look for and confirm the best music selections from the Smithsonian Folkways website, while Labanya concentrated on securing images in the public domain to place into Google Earth.  Their collaboration continued for months and produced the collection of Google Earth files and teacher guides found on this website.