Google Earth

Original Image: "NIN Tour on Google Earth"
Flickr Photo By Nine Inch Nails Official's Photostream
Released Under An Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Liscense
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

I have never really had the chance to play around with Google Earth before, and as a result, I always thought that it was just a fun application. I never really considered that it may have some technological relevance in the classroom. However, now I can see that there are endless ways that google earth can be used to enhance classroom learning.

In the most basic way, if you were teaching young students about their community, you could pull up an interactive map of the community in which students could move the cursor around and see the different buildings that can be found in their community such as their own house, the supermarket, their school, etc. Students can even travel back in time to see what their community looked like in the past.

However, Google Earth is no longer just limited to viewing the earth. If you were learning about the moon, for example, Google Earth would be a great tool to suppliment what you were teaching children in the classroom. Imagine if you could give students homework that was to go play on Google Earth on their computer. This is something that is interactive and fun. If students enjoy the homework that you are giving them, then you aren't going to have to fight them every day about doing completing it.

The moon feature of Google Earth is really cool because you can explore the moon with real planning charts that were used during the Appolo missions. You can also see all of the artifacts that humans have left on the moon, and view the spacecrafts that we have sent there. You can even zoom in to see any of the Appolo landing sites on the moon. Once you arrive there you can see real video of Neil Armstrong on the moon and actual photographs taken by astronauts themselves. Obviously, most of your students will never have the chance to travel to the moon, but using this technology they can see what the surface of the moon looks like right from the comfort of their own classroom. I think that this would make the moon more realistic for my students. Otherwise it may be difficult for students to make connections with something that they have only seen at a very far distance in the night's sky. Similarly, if you are learning about space in your classroom, you can use Google Earth to explore stars, the Milky Way, and other locations within our universe.

There are also some really cool features of Google Earth that teachers might want to use with your students if they are learning about Mars. For example, students can see what Mars looks like today, but they can also go back in time and see maps of what early scientists thought that mars looked like. They can then compare and contrast what we know about Mars today to what we thought that we knew about Mars in the past. Students can also follow the path of the rover, Opportunity, which is still on Mars today. This is great if you are teaching your students about different space missions that NASA has been involved in. What I love about this tool is that if you want to learn more, you can click on the travelers guide icons, and an information box will pop up to give you more in depth information about what you are viewing. Children can also look at high-resolution photos that have been taken by NASA spacecrafts as recently as a few hours ago. Picture like these are tools that will engage student learning, and you would be hard pressed to find such up to date information on any other website.

The oceans are another science topic that Google Earth could assist in learning. This section includes National Geographic videos of the ocean, and videos of Cuusteau's torch-lit journey through the ocean. Students can also learn about sea creatures that live in particular parts of the ocean, and take quizes to assess their knowledge of what they already know about particular aspects of the ocean. Children can follow the path of an actual whale-shark or take a look at the Marienna Trench, which is one of the deepest spots in the ocean.

Finally, if you were taking students on a class trip, this could be a very useful tool to use. For example, before we went to Washington D.C. in eighth grade, we could have viewed different 3-D images of the White House or the Pentagon. My high school foreign language class took a trip to Europe our senior year, and it would have been really cool to have taken some 3-D tours of the city that we were going to or some of the historical buildings that we would be seeing. This would have given us a way to get our feet wet, and to get excited about the trip. In addition, it woul have given us a better idea of what to expect, before the trip.

I believe that Google Earth has so many applications in the classroom because you can use it in its most basic form for younger children, or you can explore its more complex functions when the children grow older and the topics that they are learning also become more complex. The last feature of this program that I found really was that students have the ability to label and record the places that they have traveled within Google Earth. Students can then take the experiences that they are learning about in the classroom home, in order to show their parents, and they can be proud of what they are learning in school.

In order to use this technology, I, as a teacher would need to understand how it works, in order to teach my students how to use it. I would then need to narrow down the content area so that I knew if I would be using the ocean application, the moon application, etc. I wouldn't want to overwhelm my students with all of the information that I just presented above at once. In addition, I would need to have knowledge of the content area because I need to be able to answer my student's question about the content that they are seeing on screen, and also because I need to be able to evaluate that all of the information that they are gathering from Google Earth is accurate. Finally, I need to know how to teach this content knowledge because I cannot solely rely on technology to teach my children a specific subject. It can supplement the learning process, but technology cannot be responsible for being the entire teacher on a particular subject.