Teachers at Huntington High School are combining GigaPan technology with West Virginia history to engage students and help them understand the unique culture that surrounds them.
Coal and coal mining in West Virginia has had perhaps the biggest impact on shaping the history and now the future of our state. Coal is found in 53 of its 55 counties with 43 of them having minable reserves. Even though coal has played such an important role in developing WV and the future of our state depends on its use as an alternative fuel, few WV students know much about it. School teachers from Cabell County are embarking on a unique project this summer to develop the skills necessary to bring place-based curricula dealing with WV coal to their own classes. These teachers traveled throughout West Virginia utilizing GPS, scientific probeware, blogs, still/video cameras, and a host of software to develop a "virtual Tour" to many of the mining sites, both past and present, that have helped shape our WV history. Cabell county teachers learned about deep coal mining, surface mining, stream run-off, and the history of coal mining in general during their trip.
Below is a video created by Josh Ratliff showing how GigaPan was used to document historical sites in West Virginia history.