Language Arts

Whether your class is reading,  Possum Magic by Mem Fox, By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleishman, or The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Google Lit Trips can take your students to the setting of the book and make the story come more alive with the pictures and resources available in the placemarkers.

Older students will enjoy seeing the places in Shakespeare’s Plays,   Jane Austen’s Life and Work, or John’s Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. These sites are found in the Google Earth Community along with numerous other resources.

Social Studies

Also found in the Google Earth Community is a map showing the westward explorations of Lewis and Clark.  The placemarkers take you to the lewis-clark.org website for more information.

See the California Missions Alta California and in  Baja California by exploring these sites.

Find out about the Crisis in Darfur or track the US Unemployment Rates at the Google Earth Outreach website. Look here for other Google Earth files from community and environmental action groups.

See what Ancient Rome looked like in 3-D. Walk down the streets of Rome in 320 AD and explore the insides of ancient buildings, all recreated in Google SketchUp.

Math

Here are some places to check out for using Google Earth in math

• Real World Math Lessons with Google Earth
• Xtreme Triangles
• Teaching Math with Google Earth
  

Science

Can you think of a better tool to teach geological map interpretation? Here is great lesson from On the Cutting Edge to help you get started.

Study the effect of Global Warming with this lesson from David R. Wetzel.

Just for Fun

• Top 10 Google Earth Games

• Send a GeoGreeting . Have your message spelled out with buildings found in GoogleEarth.

There is so much available for Google Earth, and more resources being posted all the time. All it takes to implement these ideas is a free downloaded version of Google Earth 5.0 , and your lessons can take you (and your students) places.

Once you’ve downloaded Google Earth, you’ll be able to take advantage of some of Google Earth’s features you won’t find in Google Maps. Here are three features worth exploring.

As we all know, more than 70% of the Earth is covered by water. Google recently unveiled Google Ocean.

With Google Ocean, you can explore the deepest part of the ocean with marine experts, or learn about climate change and how it is affecting the ecology of the ocean and its inhabitants. To access this feature, click on Ocean in Layers in the left sidebar, and begin to explore the ocean depths by choosing the different features. Travel beneath the surface with Jacques Cousteau, watch BBC videos on the ocean, or search for shipwrecks. In the State of the Ocean layer, you can find out about the work the Monterey Bay Aquarium has been doing in their Seafood Watch program.

Prefer to explore the skies? Google Earth has a feature to help you explore stars, planets, and constellations.

Switch to Google Sky in the tool bar along the top of the screen. You navigate around the Sky, much as you do in Earth. Mouse over the upper right-hand part of the screen and your navigation controls will appear. Here you can zoom in or out. Chose a specific location to explore by using the search box as you would in Google Maps or Earth.

You’ll find lots of information in the Layers, once again found in the left-hand sidebar. You’ll find lots of great information by exploring the layers. Learn which constellations you can expect to see tonight from your backyard, and how to identify them by clicking on the Backyard Astronomy drop down features. The date and time slider in the upper left-hand corner lets you see how your view will change through a specific time frame, or you can watch the orbit of planets.

The Mars option features awesome images of our closest neighbor planet taken by NASA, along with detailed information we’ve learned from the Mars Rover.

Another recently added feature is Historical Imagery. Find this feature under the clock in the tool bar.

Use the slider to see how a location has changed over time.

Google Earth has so many educational applications! Google has teamed with Discovery Education to help teachers integrate Earth, Sky, Oceans, and Historical Imagery into your lessons. Here is a list of websites to help you get started:

http://www.google.com/educators/p_earth.html

http://www.google.com/educators/p_sketchup_discovery.html

http://www.google.com/educators/geo_class.html

Take a tour and discover what Google Earth has to offer. Now you can truly have the world at your fingertips.