Hello

I'm interested in hearing from people using Google Earth in the classroom. I am a geography teacher and am interested in hearing from other geographers AND teachers of other subjects!

I'm preparing some whole school training on Google Earth and I don't want to just talk about geography!

Many thanks

Rich

I use it but not in the classroom. I am not sure how it could be used it history. Any ideas?

That's I'm (and Russel Tarr) are working on at the minute!

Just seeing what others are doing out there.

Rich

Hi Rich,
I tried it out with a couple of year 4 classes last week, and was pleased with initial reactions. There's a few notes and links to some related resources here.
It is fairly bandwidth hungry, and requires pretty high spec hardware. Google Maps, and their public API, provide a few interesting possibilities as an alternative.

Not wishing to appear dim but what is an API?

Cheers

Rich

API = Application Program Interface, in other words it's a way that you (or more usually a third party) can write software ontop of someone else's program, in this case Google Maps. The resulting blend of your code calling theirs is referred to as a 'mash-up'. Flickr and Google are probably the most 'mashed-up'. Here's an example of one combining the two, there are plenty more examples of the sort of thing that's possible here.
In term's of other subject areas, here's an interesting example for history, although this perhaps needs a bit of work.

The advantage of this over Google-Earth for schools is that this sort of thing will run in any browser without extra software, so your students could use it from school, home or PDA.

As I'm working on the agenda at the moment....

Russ and Richard will be presenting on Google Earth at the upcoming e-Help meeting in Toulouse. Russ has some interesting ideas about possibile applications in history.