Hi Tom, I was reading your description of ways that you are using Google Earth. I like your example! Since 2001 my students have been following the voyages of Skipper Rich Wilson. He is a sailor who teaches about his voyages from the sea! Check out http://www.sitesalive.com Rich is about to embark on his next race. It is called the Jacque Vabre, beginning in November 2/3 from France and ending in Brazil. In past years, we have plotted his latitude and longitude each day on a grid, but now with the wonderful application of Google Earth, we plan to plot his latitiude and longitude directly on the globe! Additional data that he provides daily is his boat speed. Certainly combining the weather data, lat and long and the boat speed are great ways to integrate math across the curriculum-- as well as provide excitement in the next races. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck!

Check out http://www.jacksonschool.org/webcasts/Liuzhou_Meeting/ if you'd like to hear Rich speak with some uni students in China and once the Jacque Vabre begins you can see the location of the sailors at http://www.jacques-vabre.com/en/s01_home/s01p01_home.php if you'd like.

Thomas,
In regards to the questions you left on my site...
I also struggle with how much and what to put on my website. I've decided not to try to be "everything" Google Earth, but rather to emphasize the central purpose for my site which is the use of Google Earth to focus on literature. Thus, I am only constructing "peripheral" materials such as the basics video if they serve the purpose of supporting the development of a Lit Trip. You'll notice that I spoke specifically about LitTrips throughout that video when I could have made it a more generic introductions to the Google Earth interface.

As to the tools I used for the videos. Well, I'm a die-hard Mac guy. All the tools used are tools that come free on Macs. I used Keynote (very similar to PowerPoint) to assemble the pictures and to add the red boxes and red arrows that appear. Then I used GarageBand to create a "podcast" (though I had no intention of actually using it as a podcast) to create an enhanced podcast with slides, the intro and exit music, and the voiceover. The fact that I used a podcast format is the reason why the video is in a square format.

The entire website is built on one of the website templates available in iWeb. All of the pages you see are "tweaked" template pages from iWeb.

Finally, I simply publish to my .Mac server account (not free) directly from iWeb.

It's all incredibly smoothly integrated on the Mac platform.

By the way, have you seen the .kmz file where some teacher uses Google Earth to have kids do various calculations based upon a parking lot? What percentage of parking spots are used? What percentage are available? area of the lot? area of each parking spot? Amount of space required for backing out of a spot without bumping into cars behind. All sort of math embedded questions.

jerome

Hi Thomas,
I noticed you've been working with Google Earth and I am interested in knowing more about that and what you do with it. I work in technology integration for a small district in Kansas. I work with K-12, but mostly K-8 and I have a classroom who is using Google Earth. Thanks
Judy

That sounds awesome. I'm anxious to see what you come up with. I'll keep up through the discussion thread.
Judy

Hi Thomas,

I just read your posting about using Google Earth in math and I wanted to let you know about a new social network that I am starting in collaboration with Classroom 2.0. It is titled, "Teaching Content" and it's address is http://www.teachingcontent.ning.com. This social network site is designed to specifically host discussion about using Web 2.0 technologies for teaching content. I'm hoping that you might be interested in joining this network and helping to promote engaging discussion on it.

Thanks,

Andy

Thomas-
It's cold here! We're in the -20F range for wind chill... There is a small IT / Ed Tech informal group in the States, but classroom implementation has been hit or miss. You might find some like minded individual among the people that I follow on Twitter.

Hi Thomas,
Thanks for that hint from google earth layers. I have only just started to look at this type of resource.

Hey Thomas,
Jerome Burg from Google Lit Trips here. I was wondering if you received my message about giving your Real World Math site a little boost on Google's new Crib-Sheet for Google Earth. I included a URL for your site in the area for suggestions for using Google Earth in Middle School. I was hoping to get an okay from you, but I think I used a bad email address. I love your site!