The Earth, Classroom-Sized

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 6/1/2006

Teachers know that boring lessons on global warming can be tough ones to drive home. Enter online search site Google and publisher Scholastic, which teamed up this year in honor of Earth Day to build a site that lets students literally fly across the world and see for themselves how the earth is changing.

Both Scholastic (teacher.scholastic.com/lessonplans/exploreyourearth) and Google (earth.google.com/scholastic/index.html) host Web pages offering two to three lesson plans called “Explore Your Earth,” which combine language arts, geography, and science coursework for sixth- to eighth-grade students.

Educators need to download Google Earth in order to use the lesson plans, but the basic version of the virtual globe program is free. The year-old Google Earth uses satellite imagery to allow users to locate specific addresses and locales. You can manipulate the 3-D images or translate the data into something as simple as driving directions.

Middle school students might not be so jazzed about mapping directions to their parents’ house, but an opportunity to fly over Montana’s Glacier National Park? Here they can learn how the famous glaciers have shrunk to one-third their size since 1850, as suggested in the “Climate Change” lesson.

Users should know, however, that the images from Google Earth are not live, but constructed from archived photographs taken in the last three years. Also schools would need some fairly recent upgrades to their operating systems to use the program. For best viewing of Google Earth, PCs should be installed with Windows XP and Macs with OSX 10.4.4.