Last Thursday Adam and Joel had the class zooming around the earth and floating through the heavens. How exciting! We went from the pyramids in Egypt to the front of our house in our street then looked up to see what stars shone over our place. The whole world and beyond was there on the computer.
I have used Google Earth with students before and it is an excellent program. Every time I use the program it has developed new features. There are so many of classroom applications. Consider:
- SOSE - The students would get a real sense of where in the world they were.
- MATHS - Coordinates, directions, mapping, measurement of time with the light/shadow feature
- ENGLISH - reading, writing add the features of your place. Find the features of others
- SCIENCE - discover fault lines and volcanoes
- The layers section is great as it enables you to see 3D buildings, weather geographical features and a gallery of information such as historical maps
Check 10 Cool and Easy Things You Can Do In Google Earth
I have concerns that information being loaded by anyone but think the education forum has real potential. http://earth.google.com/outreach/edu_culture.html . Having said that, students could enter their videos, podcasts and research into Google Earth – a real audience – how relevant is that!
