From my previous post about Google Earth (if only for social studies classes…), I think that you can see that this is an ideal application to teach Geography, as well as (to a lesser degree…) World History, American history, and even some topics like current events, and even some of the life sciences. The advantage of this program is only made practical by having some sort of an interactive display that the whole class can see. This is where smartboard technology comes in… actually the name ‘smartboard’ only specifically refers to the products from smarttech.com, but as with ‘Xerox’ and ‘Kleenex’ it has become a general name for this technology.
This is technology I wish were around when I was in middle school! The problem these days is that while most American middle school and high school classrooms have computers and projector technology, not all schools have smartboards…yet. They aren’t cheap.
So, as a means to ensure that all of the topics I intend to cover on Google Earth (and other similar applications) is broadly useful I will be covering some of the much (much, much!) cheaper equivalent technologies out there. There are several ways to accomplish similar interactive results with a projected screen (almost all of them involve s bit of home-building or some computer modifications, although most of them are relatively trivial).
In the next several weeks I intend to build all of them and review the strengths and weaknesses of all of them.
There are some projects that I have seen presented on the internet that involve using webcams, that involve using Wii wireless controllers, and most of them use a variety of infrared controllers (either store bought or homemade… these will be compared too!).
To get the most out of Google Earth, there are some aftermarket controllers out there that may be able to take the place of using a mouse that I will check out on this blog too!
So, with all of these little projects starting up in the next several weeks, I think I should first but up some resources for smartboard users (i.e. I want to cover as many bases as I can!). Here is a link! http://linkli.st/riehler/0i3RO
