education

Using Google Earth to teach math

October 24, 2013

$real-world-math$ A common refrain for students in a math class is “when are we ever gonna need this?” Real World Math is a site that tries to put math skills into real-world situations to help them feel more useful to the students. Their tool of choice? Google Earth!

Thomas Petra created the site, aimed at 5th-10th grade students, to show them why math matters in the real world. Katrina Schwartz at Mind/Shift recently wrote a great article about Real World Math, explaining why it can be such a useful tool.

Petra takes an inquiry learning approach to the Google Earth-based problems. “I want them to use the things they know already and I want them to learn new skills like critical thinking and problem solving on their own terms,” Petra said of his approach. To do that, Petra has developed more than 30 elaborate souped-up word problems based on downloadable Google Earth maps with additional information embedded at different points.

While much of the Real World Math site is password-protected, I encourage you to check it out to see what they have to offer. You can also read the full article on Mind/Shift to learn more about them.

More great Google Earth resources for teachers

September 5, 2013

Last month we shared some great tips for you on how to use Google Earth in academic settings as the school year was kicking off. Rich Treves at Google Earth Design has taken it further and launched a new site dedicated to this area called GEforTeachers.com. The site offers registration and login features (which may be of value to you), but it also allows you to choose “guest” to just hop in and try it out for yourself.

The site offers a few directions for you to choose from:

Six ‘core’ introductory video tutorials to help you get started if you’re a newbie
Four extra video tutorials, also suitable for beginners
Advanced Resources – for those with advanced Google Earth skills

Beyond that, Rich offers a few additional tips:

Practice using Google Earth. You won’t get much out of the videos just watching them. In particular, I recommend you read our thoughts on how to understand the options available in Google Earth, and then follow some tips on how to navigate effectively through Google Earth.
Complete the multiple choice questions, they’re there to help you track when you’ve lost concentration a bit and need to revisit the tutorial (you need to register to do this).
Print out the ‘cheat sheet’ which has text notes to help you practise in Google Earth

You can read more about it on Rich’s site, or go try it out for yourself at GEforTeachers.com.

Going back to school with Google Earth

August 7, 2013

Many people are gearing up the end of summer break and the start of school. In fact, our daughters just left for their first day of the school year, as have thousands of others from Kindergarten to College.

Google Earth is not only a great tool for geography – it is a tool for tying all kinds of information to location. When you first load GE you have a wealth of information available at your fingertips. Thousands of aerial and satellite photos, dozens of layers of information: city names, country borders, airport locations, road maps, National Geographic content, volcanoes, and more. Since Google Earth is an intuitive and fun tool, I believe you could use it as a visualization and educational tool for almost any subject. Once students prepare their own content, GE can be used to present their work – or even share their work with the world.

You can even use Google Earth to see places quoted in Shakespeare or the path of Lewis and Clark:

For other great uses of Google Earth in the classroom, check out this post from Frank a few years ago, or the great list of ideas from Lucas Van de paer.

If you’re heading off to a new university this fall, you can check to see if Google has released Street View imagery for that school yet so you can explore the campus. The Official Google Blog has a list of other great ways to use Google products to help with your studies this year.

If you’re heading back to school soon, we wish you great success in the upcoming year!

The Google Earth Balloon Maker

June 4, 2013

Google Earth is an amazing tool for education. Frank has shown off educational uses for Earth a number of times over the years, and we’ve seen other examples such as schools allowing the use of Google Earth on exams, students using SketchUp to model their cities, and many others.

Mike Macfaddan, a Technology Coach in Chicago’s Lake Villa School District 41, loves Google Earth but has found a big issue that he’s trying to solve:

I’ve worked with a number of teachers in the past two years to show them how they can incorporate GE into their lessons.

I’ve found that students and teachers benefit greatly when they create original virtual field trips using GE as it forces them to take ownership of their learning and demonstrate real mastery of the content, but I’ve found that in order to make nice looking GE balloons, you basically need to know HTML and CSS – which most of our students and teachers do not.

To help address this, he’s created the Google Earth Balloon Maker.

In short, it’s a WYSIWYG tools that generates the necessary code to build high-quality information balloons in Google Earth, without requiring the educators to know how to write the code behind them. It’s a fairly simple tool, but could be quite useful in many situations.

You can watch the video below to learn more, or visit mmacfadden.com/balloon-maker to try it for yourself.

Great work Mike!