Thing 4: Mapping and Geolocation

It's hard for me to believe that I haven't ever taking the time to sit down and explore Google Earth, but I really haven't. Yes, I have viewed my home and other locations to see yet another unique and amazing tool put out by Google, but I never really explored it and its options. So, for this assignment I decided that was what I was going to choose to explore.

I started off by visiting the classroom resource page and was very excited about some of the project ideas. I loved some of the ideas such as "Explore the animal kingdom and endangered species with the National Geographic layer and other content. ". However after taking a few seconds to explore it I realized that I didn't know anything about the basic features of Google Earth and that is what would be the most beneficial to me having had no real experience at all. So, I decided to take the Google Maps e-course. I watched all of the tutorials and familiarized myself with the MANY features (I love the layers). Of course I got a little sidetracked with features I wanted to explore for personal reasons, but overall I looked at the tool with classroom projects in mind.

Ideally, I would love to use this tool with a Kindergarten project I am currently doing. They do a huge project on communities and build brochures with "Pages" of places to visit while in Lake George, rules of the community, etc. It would be great to have them place markers on Google Earth of the different places in their community and attach a picture and label to go with it. However, I fear that this will be too difficult for them and very stressful on me to have 18 Kindergarteners working on this at once with no extra hands. I hate to make that my excuse though, so maybe I will try to think of a way I can still make this happen.

If I am not going to do this with Kindergarten, then I come to the dilemma of what grade to do this with. In our third grade classroom we are looking for one more "tech/library project". This grade is very willing to try new things, but we have done many elaborate projects with them that I would like to do a project that was a little less involved with them. Third grade does a unit on mapping skills with teaching "keys, legends, etc". Can anyone think of a way to use Google Earth to include these features? Ideally, it would be nice to do a project where they had to do a little research and then include that on their map. They currently do a project on Australian animals. I had an idea that they could put a marker on the map identifying the location where they can find the animal they are researching. However, I feel like this would be just another add on to an already elaborate project. It would be nice if I could somehow come up with a project where the map was the "knowledge product". Any ideas are welcome! I would love to hear ways that you guys are using Google Earth and Google Maps in your classrooms.

Now that I have touched on "ideas for classroom uses" for Google Earth and Google Maps I wanted to briefly discuss the issues that I had while using them. First, I had no idea that Google Earth was a download. Where did I miss this along the way. I thought that I was going to be able to get on the internet and start using it. I feel embarrassed that I didn't know that. Anyway, I had to try a few times to download it as it just didn't seem to work the first few times. Once I got into it I followed the step by step directions that I saw in the tutorial I watched on Annotating Google Earth. Everything worked great except when I tried to add a picture. I would copy the link just like it suggested in the video and it wouldn't work. Hmm... that meant time for a Google search. I watched a Youtube video and another tutorial by Google that was different from the original one I watched and I couldn't figure it out. In everything I watched it says something about an embed code, but I don't know where to get that. I think if I could figure that out I would be all set. I also tried to add my own photos, but I wasn't able to find the browse button they were referring to under the "Get info" option. I would LOVE help with this. Usually I find that I can figure things out after reading and watching tutorials, but I can't seem to. Other than that I found everything else fairly straight forward. I was able to add descriptions, change the view that was displayed, add layers, and much more.

If you haven't used Google Earth I think it is very useful and I feel it can be easily used with may curricular areas. For those of you already using it, I look forward to hearing some of your idea.