Cross-curricular uses of Google Earth
The technology that I chose is Google Earth, this is a pretty new technology that not all educators use in their curriculum. Google Earth is basically an application that is used on the computer to look at satellite pictures of the world. You can travel from Paris, France to Tokyo, Japan in a matter of seconds. What I did not know is that Google Earth is now being used as a tool for educational purposes. Obviously, you can use it for a geography lesson and viewing different parts of the world. But the main focus of this discussion was how to use it in other subjects like math and science. The first discussion talked about how students can plot historic typhoons that struck islands. They used this typhoon data for the plotting and then added a path and image. The students enjoyed this assignment but did not realize that they were using math. They were creating a geographic representation of an historic event –a geographic line graph. They were using data, representing values in a variety of ways, measuring, predicting adding meaning to numbers. Others came up with different ideas on how to use Google Earth for educational purposes. Students can run different numbers on population over a given time and generate a hypothesis for what it might look like in 10-30 years. This would be a great social studies lesson. As far as geography students can also study the longitude and latitude of specific parts of the world.
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2 comments:
What a great idea to use google earth for social studies. I knew about it but never thought of it. I did teach social studies but never used it. I will have to look at the software again and see how to apply it as you have outlined. Thanks!
I love Google earth and cannot wait to use the application in my classroom. I was first exposed to it in one my my classes at Cal State. It's like having a digital atlas that gives you information instantaneously instead of plowing through tons of pages to try and find a very small picture of a country, land mass, etc. I really want to make Google earth a daily part of my classroom's agenda.
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