If you’re a Social Studies teacher, or use maps in the classroom, try Google Earth. If you’ve never used it, Google Earth is a 3D virtual globe covered with satellite imagery, and it’s free! Plus, it’s fully searchable, so you can enter a city or a country into the search box and Google Earth will automatically take you there. It’s really a lot of fun to watch the whole globe rotate and zoom in on it’s destination. You can zoom in to see individual people or buildings anywhere in the world, or you can zoom out to see the entire planet. It also uses a layer system to display information about borders, roads, landmarks, etc. Google Earth has huge potential as a teaching tool.

I recommend using Google Earth in large part because of the “wow” factor you can get from students. Students want to be entertained, and a 3D moving globe is much more entertaining than those dusty maps you probably have hanging in your classroom.

I’m able to use Google Earth in my classroom with a projector and a laptop computer connected to the internet. You could even put Google Earth on each computer in a lab and let the students play around with it.

Lesson Ideas
Here are some quick lesson ideas of mine using Google Earth. Nothing too fancy yet, I’ll save those for later posts. Please share your lesson ideas in the comments.

• Quiz/review - Have your students guess where a country or city is located. Just type into the searchbox and Google Earth will take you there.
• Quiz/Review - Turn of the layer that displays state/country borders. Point to a spot on the globe and ask students to guess the state/country/city, or landmark that is located there.
• Quiz/Review - Pick Latitude/Longitude Coordinates and have the class guess the continent/state/country that contains those coordinates.
• Historical Google Maps - Google Earth has historical maps that you layer onto the globe, such as “World Globe 1790,” or “Lewis and Clark 1814,” and a dozen others. You can find them in the layers window under Featured Content –> Rumsey Historical Maps. Put up the “World Globe 1790″ map and ask students to come up with a list of ways that the 1790 view of the world is different than that of today.

The possibilities are endless, and Google Earth is cool enough that you don’t need a very complicated lesson. In fact, I bet most students would have fun and learn something just by letting them play around with it for a little while.

Check this article from Google Earth Blog about Google Earth in the Classroom.

Download it here.