Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Journal 4

I chose to investigate Google Earth on the classroom 2.0 site. Google Earth is “Google Earth is a proprietary virtual globe program that was originally called Earth Viewer, and was created by Keyhole, Inc, a company acquired by Google in 2004. It maps the earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D globe. It is available under three different licenses: Google Earth, a free version with limited functionality; Google Earth Plus ($20 per year), which includes additional features; and Google Earth Pro ($400 per year), which is intended for commercial use.[1]
The product, renamed Google Earth in 2006, is currently available for use on personal computers running Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, or Vista, Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above, Linux (released on June 12, 2006), and FreeBSD. Google Earth is also available as a browser plugin (released on June 02, 2008) for Firefox, IE6, or IE7. In addition to releasing an updated Keyhole based client, Google also added the imagery from the Earth database to their web based mapping software. The release of Google Earth in mid 2006 to the public caused a more than tenfold increase in media coverage on virtual globes between 2006 and 2007,[2] driving public interest in geospatial technologies and applications.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth)

I was very excited to see that google earth can be used in some great lessons and can actually be stretched to touch on all of the content areas. Some of these teachers have great, very creative ideas on how to incorporate great technological tools into the classroom. I learned that google earth can be used mainly for science and math lesson because of the content of the site. Using the ruler tool allows students to measure distances. There is an option to view the longitude and latitude of visited areas on the globe. Teachers can even set up a route for their students to follow and add links to each point the student stops on so that students can view movies about a destination or read information about an area, from a completely different site. There are endless tools and options that can easily turn google earth into countless lessons in any classroom. It’s amazing!
Something that was funny to me was that most of the discussion on this tool was given by male teachers. This completely follows with the idea that men prefer to teach science and math and women prefer other subjects. This lets me know that as a female teacher I need to be sure to put equal emphasis on science and math just as the other subjects.

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