Because the summer is always an ideal time for professional development, the Scotch Plains-Fanwood School District provided teachers the opportunity last week to take part in a Google Earth workshop to learn how to apply this fascinating program to our lessons and implement it in the classroom.

When most people think of Google Earth, they probably think of searching for their house on the program and being able to see it via satellite. But, this workshop helped me to realize that Google Earth is more complex and versatile than it seems.

With the latest version of Google Earth, you can search any location in the world, and see it from map view, street view, and even panoramic view. But it gets better. Did you know that with the click of one button, you can also explore the environmental issues surrounding an area, check the traffic, find out the weather, and pinpoint places of interest?

That’s just touching the surface. You can take these features one step further by creating your own tour, in which you pick places to visit and set up icons to click on that take you to videos and websites about those places. This is ideal for the classroom.

At the workshop, I created a tour revolving around resources in South America. When you click play on my tour, you are taken to Venezuela to check out oil issues, and then you’re taken to Brazil to listen to videos on deforestation in the Amazon Rain Forest. It then brings you back to the United States to learn how you can help save the rain forest and other important areas that provide resources from where you live.

While I feel like I still have so much more to learn, I look forward to exploring this program with my future students during the upcoming school year. For a geography teacher like myself, this program really has a lot to offer and can be applicable across the curriculum.