Earthquests?
Ok we are burning the night oil to finish up our final projects and I am finally done. We have been working diligently all week to develop Google Earth Lessons that any educator can use in their classrooms. Assisting us is Dr. David Hart from Wisconsin Sea Grant who took the children’s book Paddle to the Sea and adapted a Google Earth KMZ file to follow Paddle’s path to the sea.
I don’t know about you out there but this is some cutting edge exciting stuff. The projects are all over the place. Somebody is preparing a virtual tour of the sinking of the Edmond Fitzgerald complete with weather animations from the day of the sinking. There are maps that are positioned over the terrain and some people are embedding pictures into their files to include the lesson itself into their KMZ file. If you don’t know a KMZ file is the file format from Google Earth.
I am so excited to use these teaching methods during the year in my Earth Science Class. I teach in Northern Ohio and Volcanos and active faults are miles away but through Google Earth we can make virtual tours and explore the terrain using Google Earth. There are already many teachers utilizing this resource in their own way. They all use different names for them. I make a vote to call these Earthquests. Web Quests utilize the internet to complete an instructional task so Earth Quests should utilize Google Earth to enrich a lesson of their own.
Googlelittrips uses literature and Google Earth to better understand what is going on. You can visit this at http://www.googlelittrips.org/
Real World Math uses lessons with Google Earth to help with Math Skills. You can visit it at http://www.realworldmath.org/
Last one… Here is a tutorial that gives information on how to develop one of these lessons. http://www.stevekluge.com/projects/dlesege/dlesegemanual/manual.html#overlays
