Techno Tools – Google Earth in Education

“Google Earth lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places……”

(Baitullah in Makkah, visible through Google Earth)

I know Google Earth doesn’t need a introduction. This trend setting application from Google is known by almost everyone. Its usage and interface is also very simple. The reason I want to share this tool again with you is to remind you again about the versatility of this tool and the great number of resources I have on hand about using this tool to make learning fun, engaging and challenging for our kids, Insha Allaah.

Tutorials: For those who are not very familiar with this application, here and here are some tutorials from Google.

For All ages: Some great ideas to use Google Earth in Tom Barrette’s presentation below

For Younger Students: Do some scavenger hunts from here and here

For Older Students: Use these ready made resources to study different concepts like World Oil consumption, Hurricane Katrina, World wide panoramas, rising sea level animation etc.

Games for Learning: Want to fly in an F-16, or take a boat trip? Try one of these games using Google Earth

Some More: Browse through these 50 exciting ideas to use Google Earth in education. My personal favourites are Real World Maths and Google Earth Ocean.

Google Lit Trips: Looking for ways to combine digital literacy skills, research, literary study, reading and writing for the web, and more? All you need is Google Lit Trips! This one tool can provide cross-curricular connections, literary exploration, and 21st century literacy skills. Lit Trips are virtual expeditions created by teachers and their students for use in classrooms. These free resources offer a unique reading experience that pairs the exploration of geography with great literature. Google Lit Trips enhance popular stories at all grade levels by taking students on a new form of road trip. Readers will enjoy visualizing scenes and activating their imaginations as texts come to life in full-color imagery. A word of caution though, I would advice parents to have a look at the resources before forwarding it to children, as where literature is involved we being Muslims have our reservations.
You can even use make your own trips following the journeys of Ambiyaa, Sahabah and other important people in Islaam or study the important battles in Islaam etc. Imagination is the limit.

Exemplary Uses:

We recently found this skeleton of a blue whale in Google Earth as a part of our Whale study.