Bringing the War Back Home: Using Geospatial and Situation-based Technology to Teach World War I

Poster/Demo ID: 44140
  1. Todd Ogle
    Virginia Tech
  2. aaa
    Thomas Tucker
    Virginia Tech
  3. Chris Bunin
    Albemarle County Public Schools

Abstract: How do educators find ways to create relevant, engaging ways to teach the Great War – when this era has often been regulated to a few paragraphs in most textbooks? When students struggle to identify with an event that is “over there”? This session will address these questions by focusing on the Meuse Argonne American Cemetery as a case study. Teachers and scholars from North Carolina and Virginia worked on a year-long project that aimed to bring the narratives and events of this contested landscape back home. Emerging technologies like geospatial tools, augmented reality, and 3D Lidar scanning allowed for the re-creation of the contested landscape as plausible, evidence-based digital environments. The result is a practical, research-based approach to the interrogation of place, memory, and story just in time for the 100th commemoration of the World War I.

Objectives

The goals of this session will be • to share ways that innovative new technologies are representing landscape and culture in a humanities classroom • to provide best practice examples of how history and humanities education can be impacted by these technologies • to distribute scholarly-informed, teacher-created resources that highlight the best practice use of instructional technology in the classroom • to show a model of university, school, and site-based partnership that creates something new and innovative

Topical Outline

This session will provide the following content: • use of geospatial tools like ArcGIS and StoryMap in teacher education and secondary classroom programs • use of augmented reality and mobile devices in the collection and visualize of field research data • use of 3D Lidar scanning technology to replicate landscape, building, and place • integration of digital archives with each of these visualization tools in order to provide evidence-supported interaction for the student and user • teacher-created approaches and activities for the use of these resources in the secondary and university classroom

Prerequisites

This session will appeal to participants with some background in visualization tools.

Experience Level

Beginner

Qualifications

Each instructor has a proficiency and expertise in the noted technology. More importantly, each instructor was a lead trainer for the Transatlantic Teacher Scholars Program which produced this work, including a week-long research trip to the trenches and battlefields of the Meuse-Argonne area of France.

Topics

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