Google Earth Live: Helping Students

For most people Google Earth is just a fun gadget to hunt out your house or go and view the roofs of Taxi’s in the Big Apple, and maybe then use Google Street view to spy on people who were unexpectedly caught in odd situations by the Google Street View camera car, but it seems that this fantastic piece of software could actually be used for something much more worthwhile.

Over at Park Middle School, Geography teacher Sacha Batra was given the opportunity by Scotch Plains-Fanwood School District to take part in a Google Earth Workshop. And in the workshop she learnt that there is much more to Google Earth than meets the eye. With it you can really take students out of the classroom and help them explore the world, allowing them to interact with the subject they are studying and maybe even learn something that wouldn’t necessarily have been taught out of the book.

The latest version of Google Earth has the function for you to be able to create highly detailed tours based on specific subjects, and we’re not just talking about sight seeing tours here, we mean if you want to talk about Natural resources and deforestation and the effect of global warming on the weather worldwide, you can do it! You can implement videos, audio, pictures, statistics and more! This could become a fantastic tool if asked to create a presentation for your course, or even for work. Not only that, but imagine this at an even higher level, people who doctorate in their specific fields create tours and presentations that the public can view, this could quite easily turn into piece of self educating software, hopefully we don’t go as far as replacing Geography teachers with Google Earth (I had a rather cute Geography teacher!).

You can check out Sacha Batra’s article over at the Scotch-Plains website. It is a great insight into a Geography teacher’s opinion on this piece of software.

Have any of you readers ever created a tour/presentation on Google Earth? If you have, what was it based on? If you haven’t, has the article made you think about taking a closer look at Google Earth and maybe give it a shot? Let us know here at Product Reviews!

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