This was not my first self-created Google Earth lesson (see my former post), but definitely one of my first lesson resources that I geared the objectives to cover more than just the Earth Science standards. This summer has brought my graduate studies full circle with a Globalization course. At first, I thought that I was going to highly dislike this course due to its political roots, but reflectively I feel that I have learned the most from this course. While creating this lesson, I kept many of the ideals of globalization and my students' probable futures at the forefront while still maintaining the rigours of science standards. This lesson is something that I dreamed of and planned for, but just never had the time this summer to develop the materials.
This lesson was a great way to end this course because it gave me the time to dedicate towards materials needed to execute this lesson. Tools that were relatively new for me to develop were mainly synthesizing the online resources into stops; creating links, embedding images and educational simulators; and assigning an online assessment tool all within the Google Earth application. I found the aggregation of resources the most time consuming aspect of this activity. The most difficult part of this process was figuring out how to post the file on a blog format - so hopefully it works! Generally, when I create a file like the Google Earth tour, I find that I can actually upload the file to my classroom website and wiki with ease. A blog only allows you to link to web files instead of uploading, and therefore, I had to find an online file host, Google Sites File Cabinet, to upload the file and then link to that from this blog. My research on how to do this was not a waste. During my time on forums to answer this question, I also found out that you can embed a Google Earth widget into many of the blog spaces. I feel that this will be very useful when I am linking something that is not as interactive as the current file. I could see embedding it on a blog when I am just trying to create a relevance to distance or one single image instead of a tour. I am not sure that our schools server could handle 30 computers trying to access the same blog with the same overloaded widget.
I feel that Google Earth is a supreme application with its versatility and availability to download for free. I am hoping to take this same idea of a lesson on global warming via Google Earth and modify it to fit the link on the top 10 causes and effect of global warming. This website was a great resource that I discovered while finding resources on the internet for this project, but I already had the idea for the other stops in place. I also like the fact that the Discovery Education Assignment Builder allows a paperless transaction. I plan on integrating this into my case studies lesson that I generally print materials out for.
Enjoy the Google Earth tour below :)
KMZ File
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