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Want to take your class on a trip to the Grand Canyon to see the Colorado River? How about a trip to New York City or Paris, France? Can’t afford the gas you say? Well not to worry. With Google Earth 4.3 you can take your students to any location on the globe without leaving the comfort of your classroom, or filling up your gas tank!

If you haven’t used it before, Google Earth is a Web-based program that uses satellite imagery to show places all over the world. All you need to do is download the free program and you are ready to get started. If you have used Google Earth before, version 4.3 has some great new features to take advantage of as you travel around the world. Some of these include photo-realistic buildings, swoop navigation from space to street-level, numerous layers that can be turned on to show anything from locations of volcanoes to the weather. With Google’s new street view, you can place your students virtually on almost any main street in the country. You can show your students how day and night work on our planet by using the dawn to dusk views with the sunlight feature. Take your students to any landform and not only see the 3-D image, but also view all the sight-seeing pictures and information provided by numerous professional organizations to help make this learning experience more memorable.

The new Google Earth 4.3 is out of this world - and if that is your next destination, just click on the outer-space feature and you can explore our solar system in the same way you explored our planet. -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

Google Earth 4.3

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Today’s young people are tomorrow’s diplomats. That may be a hard concept to internalize as you watch your students duel over a bag of Hot Cheetos in the cafeteria, but it’s true. To get them off to a good start, send them to Future State, the U.S. Department of State’s website for youths.

The site introduces students to the secretary of state, shares stories from the children of diplomats living overseas, provides starting places for those interested in careers in diplomacy, and links to fact sheets about every country in the world. Games for younger students teach them about world flags and test their geographic smarts.

The most compelling part of the site may be the news and events section, which seems to be targeted toward middle and high school students. As any social studies teacher knows, it can be difficult to make distant countries seem important to a 15-year-old who’s never touched a newspaper. But posts like “An American Girl in Riyadh” can make a far-off place like Saudi Arabia seem real – and even interesting – to the most apathetic American student.

The site can go a long way toward making students feel like the federal government is accessible to them, and that the wide world is not so far away. -EMILY JACK

Future State

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I saw the new Indiana Jones movie last weekend, so I’m suddenly keen on history and archeology. That’s what drew me to BBC Ancient History. This site provides a close-up look at several ancient civilizations, including the Mayan Empire, Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, India, and several others.

BBC Ancient History packs the usual resources like images, time lines and scholarly articles, along with animated demonstrations of architecture, like an Iron Age Roundhouse from British prehistory. You can also find some surprisingly fun games. I recommend Viking Quest, which is like Oregon Trail, except instead of migrating to the west, you’re trying to loot a monastery in Britain. It’s not easy - for bringing home a paltry 150 pieces of silver and eight slaves, I was banished to a fishing village in Norway.

If you cover any of these civilizations during your world history course - and it’s hard to imagine world history without the Greeks or Egyptians - your students will want to check out BBC Ancient History for additional resources. They’ll get a lot more knowledge, and they won’t even have to bring a bullwhip or fedora. -BILL FERRIS

BBC Ancient History

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So I’m not the greatest at state capitals, or geography in general for that matter. I’m especially terrible at the Midwestern US, which is why I can definitely never remember the capital of Kentucky (Frankfort) or Missouri (Jefferson City). Also, Nevada’s just sounds wrong to me (Carson City?). If you’re anything like me, though, you have more of a photographic memory, so a visual game helps immensely when attempting to recall information.

With the State Capitals Game from Vector Kids your elementary and middle school kids can review their state capitals by selecting a state and choosing the correct capital from three options. I think the best part about this game is that the options they give you are all other capital cities. That way, those 50 cities stay fresh in your students’ brains rather than letting their noggins get cluttered with thinking that maybe Chicago is the capital of Illinois (it’s really Springfield) or Seattle the capital of Washington (Olympia, actually). See, I’m learning already!

Plus - and I think your students would agree - it’s always more fun to learn when you get to play games! -LAUREN FROHNE

State Capitals Game
Vector Kids

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I’m terrible at Risk, which probably has something to do with the fact that I’m terrible at geography. My main problem, though, is that I end up with terrible territories:

Opponent: “I’m sending an army into Irkutsk.”

Me: “Meh. You can have it, Nanook.”

Perhaps I’d do better if I got to defend a place I actually cared about, or could at least locate on a map. The New York Times reports a few Ivy Leaguers apparently felt the same way when they created GoCrossCampus.

Like Risk, the goal in GCC is to recruit and position your armies to take over your opponents’ territory. Unlike Risk, the territory consists of college campuses, or U.S. cities and states, and your armies consist of you and your friends. Working as a team with people within your social network, dormitory, whatever, you coordinate your movements to defeat your rival, as well as develop teamwork, collaboration and leadership skills. You can also nominate commanders, and remove nefarious spies from your ranks.

The game’s creators - a small group of Yale students - designed the game to be compatible with existing social networks, both online and face-to-face. They also play up the game’s small time-commitment - only a few minutes every day.

GoCrossCampus isn’t available to the general public just yet, but the founders plan to expand into high schools, as well as corporate team-building exercises. If you can’t wait that long and you’d like to participate at your school ASAP, you can contact them via the GoCrossCampus website. It’s a good way to bolster school spirit, as well as inject a little energy into your next geography lesson. -BILL FERRIS

Storming the Campuses via the New York Times
GoCrossCampus

20 World Geography Facts That Might Surprise You - If the world were flat, we would all be spinning out of control right now, because 90% of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere. See, there are facts like that about our world’s geography that you did not know, but you soon will thanks to Boots-n-All. Also, did you know that France is about 30% larger than the state of California? No, you did not.

43 Amazing Resources for Writers - I know, I know, I write about writing a lot, but I think it is important. Also, as it turns out, there are a lot of resources out there for writers. In fact, here are 43 of them from Cath Lawson and they are all very amazing.

100 Free Podcasts from the Best Colleges in the World - Stanford, MIT, Berkley, and other colleges are embracing the wonders of podcasting and making them available to you. Who needs to break the bank on expensive tuition when you can just plug in your eardoos and listen your way to knowing Engineering Ethics. Cultivate Greatness has compiled this list that has some great colleges to choose podcasts from… even (shudder) Duke.

The Top 101 Websites for Teachers - Thank me later– or now, if you want– for these 101 websites just for you. This blog is not terribly unlike our own, but you know, not as snarky. Presented by AssortedStuff.com, a site that is just as valuable as this list, but not quite as compartmentalized. There are some great resources here, but if you really want the tools and sites that will help you teach at your best, there is only one source you need. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

The web is a wonderful place, full of exciting activities, and interesting information, but like many a Golden City, it has it’s potholes, and those become really noticeable when you teach primary age students (five to eight year olds here in the States). There are lots of sites that are safe, and many that are interactive, but there are few safe, non-commercial sites for kids to meet other children in a social network. The folks at Children’s Television Workshop are neatly filling this void by providing Panwapa. You may be wondering, what do I mean by social network? Social Networks are places like Beebo, and MySpace. Now, you’re wondering how could this be useful for education and safe enough to use in the classroom? Don’t worry about it, it’s all been designed with education in mind.

According to the press packet,

Panwapa, which means “here on this earth” in the Tshiluba language, aims to foster the foundation for global citizenship and community activism in young children, ages 4 to 7. Featuring an entirely new group of Muppet characters, Panwapa consists of an interactive website, www.panwapa.com…

Wow, they get to share their interests and culture, learn about other kids’ interests and culture, and get some geography on top of it! The site is set up for a high degree of safety. Children are assigned a word number combination based on their country (like USA15431). This does mean that you need to remember to print out the confirmation page for each student, so they can re-access their account. This may be a pain, but it means it will help you make the case for safety when you discuss using this site with parents and administrators. -ALICE MERCER

Panwapa

The world keeps shrinking. Online technology makes learning about other areas and cultures feasible for everyone without the hassles of obtaining a passport and figuring out exchange rates. ProjectExplorer makes the process even easier by hosting several online excursions around the globe at one website.

ProjectExplorer is a collection of virtual field trips with video, pictures, and journal entries that chronicle the adventures abroad. The site currently features trips to South Africa and Shakespeare’s England (via historical sites rather than by time machine). Each trip has multiple tour guides for each grade level (one for elementary, one for middle, one for high school, etc.), so you can be sure your students will get the information most appropriate to them.

Traveling is a wonderful way to learn about history and culture in other parts of the world. It’s also a great way to max out a credit card and miss a lot of school, so it’s nice to know sites like ProjectExplorer won’t leave your kids behind. -BILL FERRIS

ProjectExplorer

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World War II was a dangerous time when pretzels attacked croissants and sushi attacked cheeseburgers. The Gulf War conflict saw chicken nuggets dropped on unsuspecting kebobs.

That’s not exactly what you’ll find in history books, but Stefan Nadelman’s brilliant five-and-a-half minute film Food Fight recreates our country’s military incursions and involvements since 1939 using food as its main characters. You’ll see egg rolls, French fries, bagels, and falafel engaged in combat and culinary violence that will no doubt provoke conversation about warfare and world affairs. Students may have trouble deciphering which foods represent which countries, but a handy cheat sheet fills you in on why the beef stroganoff keeps multiplying and how the kebobs represent different interests. The site also lists which battles are depicted.

Food Fight is an imaginative way to synthesize almost a century’s worth of aggression, and with a little more imagination, you could find a variety of ways to use the film in your classroom: discussion starter, model project, or sample for media analysis. Just be careful to keep your bag lunch out of sight—you might be drawn into additional combat. –ROSS WHITE

Food Fight

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Sure, Google Maps is cool, but without basic knowledge of how maps work, it’s not an effective tool for students. The ability to use and understand maps is a skill, and it’s one that improves with exposure to maps. Two of my favorite online collections are Alabama Maps from the University of Alabama and the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection from the University of Texas.

Alabama Maps encompasses a contemporary map collection as well as a historical map archive. The contemporary maps are large and easy to use, and are available “free of charge by anyone for any purpose.” They include unlabeled base maps that could easily be turned into classroom games or quizzes. The historical map collection is categorized by region, and includes maps related to special topics like the Civil War, railroads, and National Forests. The cross-curricular possibilities are endless: if you’re an English teacher teaching Huck Finn, why not show your students an 1836 map of the Mississippi River?

The Perry-Castañeda Collection is similarly extensive and easily navigable. Most of the maps are in the public domain and, hence, copyright-free. The front page is updated to align with current events – an easy one-stop search for teachers looking to tie geography to the news: current offerings include Afghanistan, China, Tibet, Iraq, Kosovo, Sudan, and maps showing results of presidential primary elections.

So before your students go off geocaching willy-nilly, make sure they know which way is north. -EMILY JACK

Alabama Maps
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

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Photo credit: Dunechaser on flickr

Can your students find New York on a map of the U.S.? The 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy found that half of young Americans could not. Even fewer could find Ohio.

On the other hand, the winner of the 2007 National Geographic Bee, an 8th grader, successfully answered the following question: “A city that is divided by a river of the same name was the imperial capital of Vietnam for more than a century. Name this city, which is still an important cultural center.” [Answer: Hue]

On which end of the spectrum, from can’t-find-a-large-U.S.-state to knows-rivers-in-small-East-Asian-countries, would you like your students to be?

National Geographic created My Wonderful World specifically to address the results of the 2006 survey.  The “For Educators” page includes a list of ten ways to make students more geographically literate, with links to other excellent geographical resources.  A separate page for students leads them to grade-level-appropriate resources, like online games of the “It’s-so-much-fun-I-forgot-I-was-learning” variety.

Could you be the next teacher to produce a Geography Bee champion? -EMILY JACK

My Wonderful World

Photo credit: woodleywonderworks on flickr

Odysseus may be hopelessly lost, but you and your students don’t have to be. Thanks to Google Lit Trips, you can follow the story from above with all the clarity of Zeus. With the satellite imagery and smooth-sailing style of Google Earth, these tours of the greatest road trips ever written will help your students put what they’re reading into perspective.

There are Lit Trips for all grade levels, from Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The maps are handy enough on their own, but they’re also accompanied by contextualizing photographs (a picture of a dust storm for the first chapters of The Grapes of Wrath for instance) and often discussion questions as well.

There are plenty of epic journeys not up on Lit Trips yet, so if you’re excited about the tool and feeling ambitious, make it a class project to develop one. There has already been a trip developed by a first grade class, so how hard can it be?

A word of caution: beware the allure of detours! I started off following Steinbeck’s Joads to California and ended up on the opposite coast hovering over my parents’ house. -MARIELLE PRINCE

Google Lit Trips

Think you are better than me at Tetris? Chances are likely that you are NOT, but you might fare better with MapMSG.com’s Stateris. It’s exactly what it sounds like it should be - you use states and countries instead of ‘L’ pieces and little ‘t’s. Start off with the U.S.A. and try all three skill levels - hard being, well, pretty hard. Once you think you have it all figured out, give Japan or Africa a run for their money. Heck, you can even give the counties in South Carolina a whirl.

As a nice addition to the site and for more fun with maps, you can also personalize real satellite maps and get a chance to play God with your own text and images in various places in the world. Try out writing your own smoke signals, crop circles, or Hollywood sign. These games and activities are useful for students of all age groups, and Stateris puts an added challenge on a classic favorite game. - JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Stateris
MapMSG

Can you list all the countries in South America (and not just the ones who grow your coffee)? How about Europe? More importantly, can your students name those nations? If your answer to any of these questions is, “I don’t know, stop bothering me!” then you may want to invest a few minutes in playing a couple of geography games.

The title of the South American game, Name the 13 South American Countries in Less Than 2 Minutes, is both wordy and inaccurate (you actually get 3 minutes). However, it’s also a fun way to review our continental neighbor to the south.

For a bigger challenge, head across the pond to play the same game in Europe (I am not typing that name out). This time you’ve got to deal with 49 countries in only 5 minutes, which seems unfair considering a similar game gave you a whopping 10 minutes to name all 50 states (for all the good that extra time will do you). But the time constraints only add to the fun. And nothing beats having a breakthrough and remembering countries like Luxembourg and Belarus. -BILL FERRIS

Name the 13 South American Countries in Less Than 2 Minutes
Name the 49 European Countries in Less Than 5 Minutes

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Do you know which nation’s borders are in both Asia and Africa? Can you count the number of U.S. state capitals west of Los Angeles? Which state is the only one to grow coffee commercially?

If you know the answers - or even if you don’t - spend a few minutes taking the San Francisco Chronicle’s Annual Geo Quiz. Or better yet, have your students take a crack at it. The questions are fun, though they’re all over the board, so good luck tying it to any particular lesson. You can find the answers via a link at the bottom of the page, and you’ll be amazed at some of them.

This quiz is a fun way to pick up a few facts about our world, as well as to assess students’ general knowledge about geography. You can also use it for classroom trivia challenges. Any kid who can tell you which two countries are bordered by 14 neighbors deserves some serious extra credit. -BILL FERRIS

Annual Geo Quiz