Google Earth Lessons Blog

Sorry about being so MIA lately!

Some of the things I have been working on but haven’t figured out or written up include:

• A synthesis of an idea I found over at the ISTE site where students chat ‘directions’ to another class on how to construct a shape. This builds math vocabulary, critical thinking, keyboarding and collaboration skills all at once. This one is pretty cool! What you do is either set up a chat server or install a LAN chat client (Tonic is currently my Windows Only Fave, but it doesn’t allow chat tracking from a central administration point, thereby bringing up cyber-bully type issues), so what you do is have students either use Google Earth or Google SketchUp and chat the directions to other kids. In my lab what we are going to do is the kids will use Google Earth, find a location and then give directions to a place somewhere else, for instance from the Courthouse to the Science Museum, by giving directions (go North 3 blocks, turn west, go 250 feet, ….) to a kid on the other side of the lab. Should be neat when I get the bugs worked out. With SketchUp what they would do is construct a shape and then chat the directions on how to build a duplicate with proper measurements to the other kids. The cool thing about Tonic is that you can attach files, so the kids can check each other’s work!
• Something that I have been puzzling over for months! How to use all the abilities of Google Earth, with time stamps, flash, etc. to create a ‘Where in the World is Carmen SanDiego’ placemark game to teach world geography (with Google Sky it could even be a ‘Where in the Universe’ game too!). I know that starting with a flowchart is the way to go, but there has to be a relatively easy, low-tech way of building the game. It would be perfect for high-tech network links and PHP (way complicated for the average person) type stuff, but my goal is to make a lesson template that any teacher can construct in an hour or less, allowing quick, easy curricular customization. It’s not going so well…
• Richard Treves had a neat idea for linked PodCasting Placemarks to create a tour, but the site he uses to create the flash based audio is commercial (15 minutes free space) so I was thinking there has to be a way a teacher can just record themselves and then toss the audio files wherever they need them, like a hard drive, USB drive, whatever, but I keep getting stuck on how to change an Audacity MP3 into a playback controlled flash file. When I figure it out to the point where the steps are super simple I will crank out a tutorial.
• Another thing that has been bugging me lately is why I am only yakking about Google Earth? Google Maps can do a lot of the same stuff and it runs pretty much on any computer without having to install special software or get the IT people fussy with you. Therefore I have made a command decision to start tossing Google Maps lessons I stumble across on here too. How’s this one for starters (courtesy of GoogleLatLong )? GoogleLitTrips, except with maps instead of earth… Tom Woodward’s neat lesson or Dale Basler’s physics lesson (that guy deserves an award! He has a great Blog!)
• I swear my to-do list is getting too darn long! There are such neat educational opportunities using Google SketchUp, Google Sky, the time slider, the new Weather layers, it is practically endless, and here I am running four clubs at the school on top of teaching 900+ kids and trying to keep my wife from feeling too neglected.. Oh well, I guess sometimes negligence is bliss

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the ol’ US of A!

David

The latest release of Google Earth is an exciting advancement in the technology! If you haven’t downloaded it yet, go grab the new version. It is well worth it! From the incredible clarity of GigaPixl Photoviewer technology to Google Sky allowing for exploration of the night sky and even a flight simulator mode, there is something for everyone.

One of the most exciting educational advancements, however, is the ability to incorporate Flash and other multimedia content within placemarks.

After learning of the ability to incorporate flash video I got pretty excited, yet the only examples shown were of YouTube videos. YouTube is a nice resource for personal entertainment, but due to it’s open, relatively unfiltered nature, it is not suitable for young eyes and is therefore blocked from many schools. Our entire District network has YouTube and other video sharing sites blocked. What is not blocked though are quality video sites such as UnitedStreaming, the Library of Congress and many other on-line video resources. Therefore I decided to test other multimedia formats and met with good success.

Unfortunately the video ability of Google Earth is limited to computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, not Apple or Linux computers. At least not yet.

After extensive experimenting I was able to get the following multimedia formats to work in Google Earth placemarks: avi, mpg, wmv, mp3, asf and of course, swf. You can download the sample placemark collection here. A tutorial on how to embed the files into placemarks is here.

By using commercially available Flash authoring software like Camtasia Studio, it is now possible to create and display SCORM compliant flash quizzes inside placemarks without sending the student out of the application, allowing for smoother student workflow.

I believe that this new version of Google Earth is truly a turning point in that it allows for even fuller interaction with our amazing planet and the amazing people who live, or have lived on it’s surface.

Next up, I am going off to play with Google SketchUp and Sketchy Physics, a cool new plu-in that allows for objects in SketchUp to move and react to their environment. I’ll keep you posted as time allows…

Many thanks to Roy Denton and Echo Ukrainetz for submitting new lessons!

Roy has some neat ideas on how Google Earth can be incorporated into an investigation of the U.S Civil War by 5th grade students, although it could easily be adapted to other grade levels. You can find his lesson here.

Echo has put together a neat Web Quest style lesson where students explore (research) Spain and share their new knowledge via Google Earth. Echo’s lesson is here.

Once again I would like to offer my apologies for not maintaining the site over the last several months. The school year has been daunting for a number of reasons, but things are finally starting to settle down (now that the Yearbook is off to the printer!) and I promise to soon integrate new lessons I have developed as well as linking through a wealth of other lessons that have been collecting around the web.

Stay tuned, there are some neat things coming! With Google Earth now supporting the 4th Dimension - Time, along with new tools like KML editors that make creation of sophisticated placemark collections even easier, not to mention some of the amazing new content included in Google Earth Layers, the power of this free tool has literally exploded!

Some of the lessons I personally have worked on with the kids and will soon write up in ‘Official’ GELessons format include a science lesson on landforms, a K-2 lesson about ‘My World, Small to Big’ and another lesson I am developing entitled ‘Mysteries of the Atacama’.

In addition you can expect to see lessons that incorporate Google SketchUp for Math and Geometry too!

Part of the problem too is that I keep finding really neat, free stuff that energizes the kids that are not Google Earth related. The latest is a wonderfully fun little program called the SoupToys Toy Box which has turned into the latest fad at our school thanks to the little simple machines related critical thinking lesson I created (the .doc Challenges worksheet is here). Stuff like that, along with others like Stellarium (an awesome free planetarium program) and Celestia (an amazing space investigation tool, a bit complex for Elementary though due to interface issues) and others just divert my attention from Google Earth! Sometimes it’s tough being a scatterbrain

Anyway, thanks for visiting!

What a wonderful vacation!!!

Europe (Germany & Austria) was spectacular! Whenever I travel there I always come back appreciating the depth of the culture and history that is so well preserved, and this trip I got a wonderful sense of how well the Europeans have managed their environment along with their cultural history. With a human history that stretches back tens of thousands of years, the place is remarkably well kept! Densly populated, but with wonderful natural areas, the Germans have incorporated a love of natural places with a governmental system that espouses environmentally sensitive development. The major metropolitan areas are not like in the US with vast expanses of concrete, but discrete urban areas surrounded by garden like rural areas. It was so refreshing!!

But now I am back and am a bit listless. While I was away, the US Techno world rolled on at its frantic pace, replacing Google Earth, SketchUp and even Picassa with new versions. The changes are subtle, yet profound. With the new releases the uses of Google Earth have grown tenfold! Not only does GE allow textures in models (there is sooo much your students can learn from this alone!!!) but there are new layer options and Mac and Linux versions as well, which opens up this fantastic tool to even more students! The Picassa Beta also allows for Geotagging of photos, meaning that you can attach a GE location to pictures (for those of you doing ‘How I spent My Summer Vacation’ activities at the beginning of the next school year, HEADS UP!!).

So, more lessons are possible, more possibilities are lessons and there is even mooore work to do around here!!! The never ending world of Instructional Technology rolls on, even on vacation…

David

In the old days (4 years ago) I was the Tech Contact for a Middle School but ended up transfering to an Elementary classroom. The biggest reason was because it was becoming frustrating trying to keep up with all the changes in technology. We started out with Apple IIe’s and by the time I left six years later we had labs full of Windows XP computers running off a Novell network and there were moves on to go wireless with 801g and on an on it went.

That is the thing about technology. It changes so rapidly. Here we are, just a little over a month into the launch of this site and already I am having to re-evaluate a lot of things. The biggest, of course, has to be the release by Google of two things, first is the upgrade where by clicking on a placename you get a nifty selection of search choices, the second, bigger one is the release this past week of a free version of SketchUp. If you haven’t tried it yet, it is FANTASTIC! A Geometry teacher’s dream!

I have always been a big believer in free stuff. Being a teacher I suppose it comes with the territory. One of the first professional development books I ever bought when I started in the classroom was the ‘Free Stuff for Teachers’ series. At the beginning of this school year (August ‘05) I was given a brand new computer lab to teach in, but the only software that came with it was Microsoft Office and I had to teach K-5 in the lab on a daily basis. It wasn’t a problem, thanks to free and Open Source software. Things like G-Compris for the little kids to teach mouse skills to Gimp for the older kids to teach about bitmap graphics along with the wonderful world of the internet (Starfall.com comes to mind) made teaching technology a breeze.

That is partly why I was so taken with Google Earth, and now SketchUp. It allows students to learn the tools of technology hand in hand with the core curriculum of a regular classroom all without spending a dime on software!

But it is still tough keeping up with the technology, even when you are focusing on a single application. Who knows what they will come up with next month! No wonder most of the classroom teachers I work with shrug their shoulders when we discuss increasing their use of technology in their classrooms. If I am overwhelmed as a techno-junkie, it must seem truly befuddling to the ‘email & word processing’ crowd.

The amazing thing with technology in the classroom is that it is not ‘the more things change, the more things stay the same’ it is the more things change, the more things keep changing.

I’ll try to keep up…

David