Earth

Google Earth allows the computer to become a window to anywhere...viewing aerial and satellite images, photos, road and street maps, business listings and more...wow, now you can even navigate under the ocean's surface and explore sea floor terrain, you can view historical images going back decades, imagery of Mars and take guided tours of Mars, tracing paths of rovers and landers along the way. Wow, Google Earth is a great tool for teachers, especially in geography and science.

I next looked at the Pre-School lesson plan. This lesson plan gives ideas for integrating Google Maps, Earth and SketchUp into the Pre-K classroom. One idea is to create placemarks with pictures, videos, and audio clips of famous poems that could be listened to by students. Then allowing students to draw a picture about the poem listened to, also, the lesson plan offers the idea of zooming in on where a student lives and having them identify various objects and their colors on the satellite image, such as houses, roads, trees, and cars. And lately, the lesson plan suggests creating an alphabet tour using the first letter of famous places around the city (ex. Atalanta) and then stdents may know where these places are in relation to where they live, then the teacher suggest mixing up the placecards and having students put them in alphabetical order.

The next lesson plan I looked at is the Elementary lesson plan for lower grades 1=5. This lesson plan gives basic ideas for integrating Google maps, Earth, and SketchUp also. It suggest turning on the borders layering GE and having students recognize various states, provinces and countries. It also suggests to create a map of people who explored America. Using the line tool to trace their path across America and creating placemarks along the line to explain important events.

Lastly, I looked at the Google Geo Teacher Institute 4 of 5 site. This site explains how Google SketchUp is no longer owned by Google, but by Trimble. SketchUp is a free download and it enables the production of 3D objects which can be located and viewed by Google Earth.This site shows the Ecotricity wind-turbine in Swaffham, Norfolk which provides power for hundreds of homes in the town. The presenter, Beryl Reid "placed" the models in the landscape where they are actually located and then added realistic photo textures from Google Street View. This site show several different images and how the are being  "placed" on SketchUp in order to create the idea of Google "trips"...quick tour points. This geographical enquiry is interesting and beneficial when teaching geography or social studies in the classroom.