Google Earth: The Virtual Globe Experience!

Imagine being able to visit a place you have always wanted to from the comfort of your own home. Sounds intriguing, right?! Well, Google Earth can help you do just that! Google Earth is a virtual globe that allows you to view hundreds of cities, towns, and buildings around the world through high resolution and satellite images. Here, give it a whirl! Click: Google Earth

The students in my 3rd/4th science/social studies class are learning about identity and culture. Our district technology specialist, Ms. Tesmer, recently created a wonderful 4th grade Illinois inquiry unit using Google Earth. I knew this would be something my students would love as well, so Ms. Tesmar and I sat down together to adapt the unit to make it fit my students' unit concepts and needs. A huge thank you to Ms. Tesmer for all her expertise and great development of this unit!

Our essential question for this week's unit is: How might geography influence the culture and identify of a place? 

The students started the unit by participating in a quiz-quiz-trade using geography-related vocabulary cards. This activity helped the students review and learn new landforms. We had a great discussion on the pros and cons of the different landforms, as well as what might influence the culture or identity of a place that has "this" feature. We also discussed how the students made these assumptions.

Student Example: 

Landform: Island 

Pro: Peaceful, quiet, relaxing, beautiful scenery

Con: Not as many resources, flooding since it is surrounded by water 

Influences: Since an island is surrounded by water people may need to build their home off the ground, such as on stilts to avoid flooding in their home. 

Geography deals with so much more than just landforms, and to connect our essential question further to geography before moving into the Google Earth portion of the unit, the students had to answer one more question to further support the original essential question: “What is home?/What makes something a home?” The students drew a square on their paper and filled words within the square that represent the internal part of their definition for home. On the outside of their square the students wrote the external factors that influence their internal definition. The students' responses were all compiled into a class definition for the word, home. This helped connect not only key words of geography but also concepts of our essential question that deal with culture and identity.

Today, the students were now ready explore a human home from seven different areas around the world using the Google Earth Voyager called “This is Home”. The students were responsible for making observations and developing questions about the geography, landscape, and climate of this "home."

In the final days to come the students will use Google Earth to evaluate the following ideas:

• Why might this group have decided to live here, given this location's geography, landscape, and climate?
• What might be unique challenges and requirements of the landscape, climate, and other conditions where these people live? Why may they have settled here given the unique challenges?
• How might the people in this region adapt their home to the unique challenges and requirements of the landscape, climate, and other conditions where they live?