Google Earth

I was surprised that one would need/want to use folders when working with Google Earth, but when the tutorial suggested putting all the place cards for a project in one folder, that made sense. I was really surprised that Google EARTH includes Mars, and that you can do all the same things with it that you can with the earth. (The Sun feature however is not about the sun itself, but shows a time elapse picture of how the sun shines on an area on earth, including sunrise and sunset.)

The middle school lesson plans were exciting and I could see how Google Earth could really help them to look at events through a geographic (and even historical) perspective. I especially liked the idea of using Google Earth to look at migration patterns and the push and pull factors behind immigration, as well as the prehistoric migration of humans across the globe. I like that it can be incorporated into other subject areas, such as history (locations of and physical distances between battles) and even literature (birthplaces of writers and locations of events in novels and poetry), and even science (environmental issues and perhaps even the location of species).The high school lesson plans referred to visual field trips (including ones the students designed) migration patterns of whales and how they affect the Maori people, and tracing the paths of historic explorers.

I viewed one of the education link that had additional ideas for how Google Earth (as well as Google Sky) could be used to understand changes in the environment , natural disasters, and to view an earthquake in real time. I was excited to see several links to tutorials on Google Earth that were not videos!!! The fact that lesson ideas were arranged by themes made the site much more useful, and it was exciting to see how it could even be used in mathematics (something that seemed shocking when I first looked at it, but then seemed like an obvious application that I should have recognized).