The effectiveness of Google Earth

Google Earth has provided an excellent opportunity for teachers who can go where they couldn't go before. Hall Davidson, Director of Discovery Educator Network states "With Google Earth, the earth itself becomes a video. It spins and twirls with an interactive terrain, astonishingly detailed. Kids zoom in on the area of the Coliseum or the Louisiana river delta. I watched sixth grade California public school teacher Rey Hernandez's students insert a video on the American Revolution from unitedstreaming onto the site at Bunker Hill. Dennis Wong's 5th graders overlaid their photos onto their family country of origin and created a truly relevant flying world tour. Both exercises created savable files, an incredibly important feature. Ray's kids' work can be shared on the Internet with his Discovery Education Network nationwide. Mr. Wong's work remain safely accessible only on his hard drive for use all year in his room. Google Earth enables teachers and communities to easily create tremendous collections of work integrating video, 3D buildings, photos, pod casts, or NPR stories. Teacher and students will travel the real earth of explorations, migrations, heroes and history and share new instruction growing on the planet itself."

This technology has great many uses, but also containing the ability to stay within the boundaries of the content required to be learnt. With this, teachers have the ability to mix traditional teavhing methods with non traditional teaching methods. If this were used in collabaration with a multiple outcome assessment, the possiblities for the students to complete a project could be infinite.

Blackmore, J et all. (July, 2003), Effective Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to Enhance Learning for Disadvantaged School Students, Melbourne, http://www.dest.gov.au/NR/rdonlyres/D63F92A3-6931-464F-9970-D599BE3E390E/4520.ICTreport.pdf