- J.R.R. Tolkien
With Google Earth and other Geo Tools, you can develop creative, interactive approaches to enriching geospatial knowledge in the classroom. Turn your students into explorers, storytellers and cartographers, help them develop critical thinking and data visualization skills, immerse them into different ways of viewing the World and prepare them to become global citizens.
Exploration
The fundamental tenet of Exploration is you don’t know where it will take you. With Google Earth, teachers and students can now all become explorers through the 20,000 random locations that surface with the “I’m feeling lucky” button and Voyager stories; interactive story experiences that take you around every corner of Earth.
Storytelling
Teaching is, above all, about storytelling, and understanding how stories impact the world, whether past, present, or future. Classes in History, Geography, English, Mathematics and many other subjects use narratives that can be interwoven into the knowledge of that topic. Through tools such as Google Earth and Timelapse you can document and share your own stories using the World as your canvas.
Mapping
Investigate the World. Let students become cartographers by charting, plotting, planning, and surveying areas all over the world, including ocean features. By creating and comparing My Maps students gain important insights into the relationships among variables and an overall geographic area. This comparison work is one of the fundamental advantages of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Immersion
Imagine sitting at the center of a bubble and having images projected across the entire surface of that bubble, such that every direction you look you see something new. With Street View and virtual reality viewers like Cardboard you can experience these 360 views as if you are there. From the slopes of Mt. Everest and the waters of the Galapagos Islands, to the Grand Canyon and on top of the Eiffel Tower, 360 images can inspire students to comprehend the beauty and diversity of our planet.
