Month: August 2007

The new version of Google Earth has two impressive new features. First off is the amazing Sky feature:

This is accessible by clicking on the Sky button on the top toolbar. There’s also a link on the toolbar to Google Maps. Once you’ve clicked on the Sky button, you can search for places, such as the Orion Nebula (shown below)

(click to enlarge)

The ruler function is grayed out – but calculating distances precisely in light years was probably too much to ask anyway! Clicking on the particular star/constellation/feature brings up information, just as with the terrestrial version. No doubt the GE community will feverishly add new information and content to Sky soon.

The second noteworthy addition to Google Earth for educators is a book layer, as announced on the Google LatLong blog. Whilst Sky will be of great benefit to science teachers, the book layer will be fantastic for English teachers. The layer adds geo-markers to places mentioned in great texts. To get to it, go to Google Book Search in the ‘Featured Content’ menu:

Once you’ve turned on the layer, small book icons appear when you start zooming in to various places:

This builds upon the Places Mentioned In This Book feature from Google Book Search, launched back in January 2007. Given that the book search indexes books in the public domain, you’re not going to find anything recent in there, but it’s still a very engaging and interesting way to present what can sometimes be somewhat dry. 🙂

There are more ideas for using Google Earth in the classroom at this Google page and over at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk in Using Google Earth in the Classroom.

(via TechCrunch and O’Reilly Radar)

One of my Twitter friends called it his ‘personal learning network’ the other day, which I thought was apt. It’s like a cross between text-messaging and mass-emailing, but with a focus. Now it’s got even better: previously, you had to know someone’s Twitter username. Now all you need to do is use the ‘find folks!’ search box on the right-hand side menu bar.

If you haven’t tried it yet, sign yourself up and add people who’s blogs you visit as your Twitter friends. The TwitterFox extension for Firefox is well worth installing for keeping up-to-date. I think Twitter has the potential to be used successfully with students – see Using Twitter with your students over at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk. 🙂

Zoho Writer now has offline editing capabilities, much like Google Gears for Google Reader. This makes life a lot better for schools who have less-than-perfect network connections. Whilst Google Docs does automatically save students’ work periodically, this seems like an even better solution. Zoho Office might be a serious rival to Google Apps for Education after all…