Hello all,
I am posting to let everyone know of the way I have used Google Earth for public education in a museum setting.

At the Yale University Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, CT, I integrated Google Earth in to the new "Human Origins" interactive hominid timeline.

Two large touchscreens allow visitors to explore information about different hominids that have lived on earth (through narrated text and 3D skull rotations), and Google Earth provided a great way to show where the different fossils have been discovered.

Instead of a static map, the Google Earth animation (created with Google Earth Pro's "Movie Maker" module) really gives a great sense of where these different hominids lived in relation to the museum and each other, as well as showing how vast the territory was for some.

The video starts zoomed in at the street level showing the roof of the Peabody Museum (some yellow school buses are visible on the street), then zooms out so that the entire globe is visible. The globe then rotates and zooms into the various dig sites where hominid fossils were found.

For pictures and more information, please visit this page, and click on the link for "Human Origins interactive touchscreen kiosks":

http://www.goldenmultimedia.com/museum.html

The folks at Google were really wonderful, and we are very thankful they allowed us to use Google Earth Pro in this way. The addition of the Google Earth component added tremendous value to the exhibit.

Thanks,

- Kent