Google Earth

Google Earth is absolutely an amazing tool to utilise within the classroom. Davidson a teacher from Discovery Education Network believes "It has been a long time since a technology application got the eye-popping reaction from teachers that Google Earth gets. Inserting videos into PowerPoint was the last comparable roar. Which makes perfect sense. With Google Earth, the earth itself becomes a video. It spins and twirls with an interactive terrain, astonishingly detailed. Kids zoom in on the arena of the Coliseum or the Louisiana river delta. I watched sixth grade California public school teacher Ray Hernandez's students insert a video on the American Revolution from unitedstreaming onto the site at Bunker Hill .

Dennis Wong's 5th graders overlaid their photos onto their family country of origin and created a truly relevant flying world tour. Both exercises created savable files, an incredibly important feature. Ray's kids' work can be shared on the Internet with his Discovery Educator Network nationwide. Mr. Wong's work remains safely accessible only on his hard drive for use all year in his room. Google Earth enables teachers and communities to easily create tremendous collections of work integrating video, 3D buildings, photos, podcasts, or NPR stories . Teacher and students will travel the real earth of explorations, migrations, heroes and history and share new instruction growing on the planet itself. Hall Davidson Director, Discovery Educator Network."

Here are some other ideas for taken from (http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth.html) using Google Earth in your classroom:

• Environmental Science: Have students check Alaska's global warming problems. See how the Sierra Club used Google Earth to depict this problem: http://www.sierraclub.org/arctic/maps/
• Geology: Find images, links, and descriptions, with information about thousands of volcanoes around the globe, thanks to organizations like the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. : http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/globallists.cfm?listpage=googleearth
• History: Explore Tutankhamen's Tomb: http://earth.google.com/outreach/showcase.html

How about this: You tube clip of landing on the moon: http://earth.google.com/moon/index.html#utm_campaign=en&utm_medium=earthhpp&utm_source=en-earthhpp-na-us-moon

Another tool that could easily be utilised as an initial tool to engage students in a project based, authentic focus that could occur in a group context/collaborative team - (Kearsley & Schneiderman 1999, p. 1).