Betty’s Instructional Technology Blog

In my Web 2.0 workshop, the participants moved through stations using various software/web sites. As part of the station, they posted their ideas on how to use the software in their classrooms. Their ideas on using Google Earth are listed below: 

1) Google Earth would definitely be an excellent resource to use for our Social Studies curriculum. It’s a wonderful way to have students take tours through Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt!

2) This is a great resource to being students to historical sites, landmarks, or monuments.

3) Students can research travel distance from one designated point to another using math skills to convert to various units of measure.   Students could further calculate time needed to travel by foot, lessons in longitude and latitude, and other map skills.

4) We also found this resource to be a great way to search for the well-known tourist sites, picture galleries, and transporation within each country, plus lots of other options!

5) Provide images of various biomes studied within the science unit Environments.

6) Calculating distances to illustrate relative measurements and sizes.

7) Find places of interest ( Golden Gate Bridge, Washington Monument, etc) or locate Regions of the United States to go along with the Social Studies Curriculum.   

On Friday, Feb 15th, I will be presenting a workshop that will introduce  teachers in my district to some Web 2.0 tools. I wanted to start out with some links to existing software that would be easy to integrate into our existing curriculum. I will review Podcasting using Audacity & Photostory hosted on an Edublogs blog, Voicethread, and Google Earth. I also provided links to some image and audio sites as well as some Internet safety and copyright resources.  

The link to my presentation is: http://www.gtps.k12.nj.us/technology/web2.0/Web2.0_files/frame.htm

I will continue to refine it over the next few days.

Spelling Site
I came across a cool spelling web site thanks to Kevin Jarrett from Northfield schools: www.spellingcity.com . The site allows you to type your own spelling words then have the computer quiz you and will allow you to play games with the words online.

 Math Project with Google Earth
Thanks to my wonderful new aggregator, I found an interesting project that uses Google Earth and mathematics from Mathlinics. They are asking people to take pictures, video, and/or audio clips of landmarks and to create a measurement question related to the landmark. Then the students will create a Google Earth tour of the landmarks. The site is:  http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgzsrf4n_25fb89hvhf