Pages

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Google Earth

Google Earth is another one of the free applications from Google that I believe has some great impact in Education.  Many students are visual learners and any time that you can give something visual to correlate to something your saying will have a positive impact on them. 

There are many ways that you can use Google Earth in almost any classroom.  Science and Social Studies classrooms come to mind first with their ability to show locations of events, natural resources, and current events on an interactive globe.  English classrooms can show where events happened in a book, or maybe if the story didn’t have a location, it would be interesting for the students to try and place where the story happened based on literary clues on climate, ethnicity, language, and culture.  Google Earth is better than having every pull down map ever made right in your classroom.

Many people believe that Google Earth has its place in trying to find your house in a satellite image.  While this is true and students find it interesting to view aerial and satellite photography, there are many other things you can do.  For a quick look, load up the application and turn on features in the bottom left hand corner.

If you want more information on how to use in your classroom, I would be glad to help, or you can just do a quick search on Google Earth in a ____ classroom.  There are many resources out there and here is one to get you started.

How to Teach with Google Earth