Hi,
I'm a 4th/ 5th grade technology teacher. What we try to do is teach subject-area curriculum (math, science, etc) in a way that uses technology -- rather than teaching "technology skills." Google Earth is my absolute favorite new educational software. And I'm so happy that it's free!

We've installed it on all the computers in our elementary school lab. I've been working with middle school teachers, too. Here are some of the projects we've worked on in the last couple of weeks.

Fourth grade studies latitude and longitude. I introduced Google Earth, showed the students briefly how to use it, showed them how to turn on and off the lat/long grid, then posed a question like "what country contains the coordinates 2 degrees south and 30 degrees east?" They spin and zoom the globe to get there, making latitude and longitude turn from an abstract concept into a hands-on reality.

Middle School did a graphing unit where students searched for the longitude of the city they were born in, and graphed the longitude (to 5 decimal places) on the x axis vs the number of letters in their name on the y axis. (we have a very diverse student population.) There's no straight-line correlation, but it reinforces graphing skills -- and it makes for many interesting insights. Korean students have shorter last names in general than Indian students, for example. And when graphed like this, you can easily visualize those distributions.

Today I gave my fourth graders a worksheet with 4 cities on it. They did a search for that city and wrote down the latitude and longitude coordinates for it. It's the same type of assignment that might have been done last year with an atlas, but with Google Earth the concept of decimal places is much more easy to integrate!

I try to keep the work assignments short enough (10 to 15 minutes) so that they have time to explore on their own afterwards.

I'd love to share lesson plans or ideas with other teachers who use Google Earth! I'll post more here as I develop new plans.

Zip