I haven’t messed around with Google Earth myself, but lately I’ve become aware of a few neat projects using it. I’m posting links and the sites’ own descriptions. Check them out:
This site is an experiment in teaching great literature in a very different way. Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place… and so much more!
National Memorial for the Mountains
The National Memorial for the Mountains is an online memorial that uses the popular Google Earth software to show the massive scale of destruction occurring in Appalachia. The memorial identifies more than 470 mountains destroyed by mountaintop removal and connects visitors to stories, photos, maps, videos and interviews of local residents to tell the stories of those mountains and nearby communities.
Crisis in Darfur (as seen at reciproque)
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfolding in Darfur, Sudan. The Museum has assembled content—photographs, data, and eyewitness testimony—from a number of sources that are brought together for the first time in Google Earth.
Crisis in Darfur is the first project of the Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative that will over time include information on potential genocides allowing citizens, governments, and institutions to access information on atrocities in their nascent stages and respond.
So inspiring. . . I’ll be offering a workshop soon on using Google tools in the context of college courses, and I’ll definitely be showcasing these projects. What might you do–or what is your institution already doing–with Google Earth?