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Teacher Review for Google Earth

Worth the time and effort to create and share placemarks with students!

Kathleen E.
 Media specialist/librarian
Bainbridge Island School District #303
Bainbridge Island, United States
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My Subjects English Language Arts, Science, Social Studies
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My Rating
Learning Scores
Engagement
Pedagogy
Support
My Students Liked It Yes
My Students Learned Yes
I Would Recommend It Yes
Setup Time More than 15 minutes
Great for Further application
Knowledge gain
Student-driven work
Teacher-led lessons
Great with Advanced learners
How I Use It
I help students follow in the footsteps of Christopher Columbus in one unit and then also help them view the terrain of the Japanese Internment camps during World War II. Both of these lessons allow me to help the students to make their own observations about the world. While embedding text and images into placemarks requires knowledge of HTML coding, it is worth the extra effort.
My Take
Google Earth has been out and available long enough for it to no longer be the "it" thing to do but it is still so much more than just a way to see your home from above. It takes a little bit more time to create a lesson that can be easily implemented with students by making and sharing a placemark file, but I feel like the work pays dividends in student engagement. The Web site Google Lit Trips makes this a bit easier and the new Google Earth "Experiment" called Google Earth Tour Builder has great potential to streamline this process and also to more easily make students into creators.