2022
Greetings Local Guides!
My name is Dale Plotzki and I am a Level 7 guide from Lima, Peru. I love participating in our community to document Lima’s incredible food scene, and as a way to share knowledge about local surf spots. But recently, I’ve been dreaming of new ways we can leverage this amazing group of people and technology to do more good for our world. You see, I am a teacher, and I want to combine my passion for Local Guides with my love of education to make an impact in the way we share and talk about learning in schools around the globe. Our time at school is one of the most important common threads we have to pull on to progress as a global society. Sharing learning that happens in schools matters! And I believe that Local Guides and Google Maps are the dream-team for making this happen!
Have you ever looked at the reviews of either your or your child’s school on Google Maps? Odds are that what you saw is probably not the most helpful. Unfortunately, reviews of schools in particular tend to be a fairly negative and unhelpful use of this powerful tool. So I started a Google Innovator project called #EdPins to address this issue. #EdPins seeks to promote positive, informative and objective stories about the learning that happens inside classrooms around the globe using Google Maps! The process is simple; all you need to do is go to either your child’s school or a school you attended and leave a review. But instead of offering your opinion, tell us about specific pieces of learning that happened there! Examples of what you can talk about include:
- What are some of the best projects/performances/activities you remember doing or seeing at this school (photo and video evidence would be AWESOME!)
- What are some of the positive skills and attitudes you feel like you formed by attending this school? What events helped your form these skills and attitudes?
- What were some of the teams/committees/groups you got to participate in at this school? How did this help you with your social and leadership development?
- What were some of the social or volunteering activities you became involved with? What was the impact of this work?
Need some inspiration? Here are a few examples of submissions that are already live on Google Maps, helping to promote quality education around the globe with #EdPins!
- Maria Parkskolan School in Helsinborg, Sweden
- American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India
- Educacional Primaria y Secundaria 60220 Manati in Amazonia, Peru
- Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Lima, Peru
- Vanavil Trust School in Chennai, India
- MYSA Microschool In Bethesda, Maryland, USA
Once you have completed the review, the most important step is to share it out over Google Maps and social media with the hashtags '#EdPins' and ‘#LocalGuidesLearn'. Using these two hashtags will allow the submissions to be found, organized and shared! Did you know that Google Maps reviews are now searchable with hashtags? Cool!
Google Maps reviews may be the perfect spot to begin to unite the world’s schools and to share what makes the learning inside of them special. Google Maps reviews are public, visible and democratic. They are multimedia-compatible and easily shareable. They are moderated by viewers with the thumbs-up button which raises the most helpful reviews to the top. But most importantly, they can unite every school on earth; putting some of the least-visible schools on earth on an equal stage as some of the most privileged!
Whether you are a teacher, parent, student or alumni, everyone who wants to support education in a meaningful way can do so with #EdPins. Let’s leverage the incredible power of Google Maps and the Local Guides community to put learning on the map!
If you have any questions about this idea, please feel to each out to me here or Twitter at @EdPins1
Yours in Learning,
Dale Plotzki
