Earlier this week Jerome Burg, the founder of Google Lit Trips, announced that Google Lit Trips is now a 501c non-profit organization. Google Lit Trips is still free and is still a great resource for teachers of language arts and history.

Google Lit Trips provides excellent models for using Google Earth in language arts lessons. The concept of Google Lit Trips is to help students gain a better understanding of stories and their authors through mapping. Students and teachers can use Google Earth to map a story or map the biography of an author. On Google Lit Trips you can find and download lessons and Google Earth files created by other teachers. The two videos below offer overviews of how Google Lit Trips work.

Tech Awards: 2010 Laureate from GoogleLitTrips on Vimeo.

GLT Overview: Animation Demo from GoogleLitTrips on Vimeo.

Applications for Education

I’ve used the Google Lit Trips model with students in my history classes. Instead of mapping literature we mapped the biographies of famous people that we were studying. A couple of my favorite examples from students were mapping the lives of Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin. If you don’t have access to Google Earth, you can apply most of the concepts of Google Lit Trips to Google Maps.