Journal #7: Google Earth

Google Earth is a virtual globe made up of satellite images available to the public for finding images of any given location.

The teacher that posted this tool used it amazing things. She has her students map the geographic line of historic typhoons and then add graphics and animation. It is more difficult I believe (and the teacher who proposed this tool) to use technology in a math classroom then in a English or History classroom. Google Earth though seems like an amazing tool to do just that. This teacher also made a "Search and Rescue" program where her students had to factor in wind and currents and try to locate a missing boat. Now, I have no idea how to do that but i intend to find out. Finally, she added another thread with a link to a site called Real World Math which has a variety of different lesson using Google Earth. I explored some of these lessons. The one I really liked was to find volumes of a solid using images of the pyramids from Google Earth. I was thinking you could also easily use skyscrapers and other building and make it more complex by figuring out how many floors each building had or the square footage per floor. That was only one of the amazing lessons that Real World Math offered. I would really like to use these lessons when I have a classroom of my own.