Beyond the Books: Mapping Stories and Making Connections with Digital Storytelling

What if your learners could walk through history, map stories, or connect local landmarks to global narratives—all through digital storytelling? In this interactive session, we’ll show how Google Arts & Culture, Google Earth, and Google Maps can help students become creators of place-based stories that spark curiosity and build research and digital literacy skills. Using several examples of teacher & student-created content, we’ll explore how history and culture can be connected to the present, encouraging learners to see how past conflicts, struggles, and resilience shape today’s world. You’ll leave with practical resources, pre-curated stories, scaffolded models, and digital platforms for creative expression that you can use right away to engage learners in meaningful, story-driven learning.