09.15.08
One More Reason to ♥ Google
I was so excited to learn that a friend of mine got a job with the Google office in Atlanta. She confirmed the rumors about the ever-engaging working environment and offered me a tip about Blackle, an energy-saving custom search engine powered by Google. The browser turns your screen black which saves Watt hours. So far Blackle claims to have saved 825,311.665 Watt hours. Thanks Kelly…I’m holding out for an Atlanta Google t-shirt!
My fourth grade class launched a geography study today, beginning with an investigation into our Junior Geographer atlases. A study of longitude and latitude will accompany discussions about continents, hemispheres, landforms, etc., and a colleague wondered if we could incorporate Google Earth into our plans. What a great thought; once inside the program, every movement of the mouse produces a different geographic address. I think I’ll encourage my students to find the geographic coordinate for their homes, our school (and see how much of a discrepancy there is between student findings), and one free choice location. My pie-in-the-sky goal is to eventually teach my students how to add photos from their summer vacations to Google Maps, offering their photography skills as resources for others searching Google Earth.
While planning my latitude/longitude study, I came across the Google Earth Gallery a resource filled with content that teachers can use with Google Earth. A couple of my favorite gallery entries were: Median Ages in California (relates to our current math unit about information and data), Magellan’s Circumnavigation, and although I couldn’t get it to work properly, a file displaying 86 football stadiums from around the world. How fun for our elementary athletes!
Wow, it has been a while. How do teachers have time to keep up with their blogging lives? 
September 15, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to share your findings here. More teachers need to, and more teachers need to read what others have discovered. Google Earth is a lot of fun!