Google Earth

For this assignment, we were instructed to look at Alice Christie's website. One part of her website that was partically captivating was the topic of Google Earth. Google Earth is a free program that helps to bring the world into a classroom. It provide useful tools needed to enhance student learning. It has the ability to motivate and challenge students in a meaningful way. It provides visual tours and maps. Some of the tours are guided tours from astronomers and educators which feature interesting places in the sky and around the world. You can simply immerse yourself into the Earth's environment.

Google Earth provides student controlled and teacher controlled lessons. The one I looked at was on space and constellations. It provided a web based program called World Wide Telescopes. This allows your computer to virtually be a telescope for your students. I thought it was very interesting and definitely one that I want to look more into for my own classroom. I think students retain more information when they can actually SEE their subject matter rather than just by reading about it. It definitely makes teaching and learning more exciting for both teacher and students. I know that I was amazed by the beauty of our Earth just by looking at the virtual tours through doing this assignment. It made me want to learn more about certain places and then bring that new knowledge to the classroom and share it with my students. For more information about google earth, visit Alice Christie's website at www.alicechristie.org.