Friday, April 13, 2007

Nice uses of Google Earth

I haven't messed around with Google Earth myself, but lately I've become aware of a couple of neat projects using it. I'm posting links and the sites' own descriptions. Check them out:

Google Lit Trips

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 at work on Google tools, and I'll definitely be showcasing these projects. What might you do--or what are you doing--with Google Earth?

3 comments:

Dr. Brazen Hussy said...

My collaborator and I use it to map out bird territories. He's in the field and I'm in the lab, so this is a great way to communicate.

The History Enthusiast said...

This is totally unrelated, but I saw this article in the Onion and thought of you. I would've sent it via email but I didn't see that your address was posted on the site. So here goes:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/60624?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

English Advantage said...

This is off-topic and I hope it isn't considered spamming you. I'm a tutor and university placement consultant in Kazakhstan. I really enjoy reading your blog, particularly stories about students and academic life in the US. Blogs like yours are really useful for keeping up to speed about what's going on inside the tower! I'm putting together a blog for students, mainly foreign students planning to study in the US, including tips, how to act, background of university culture in the US and I would love your input and critiques in any form.
If you're interested it's at:
http://english.zendurl.com/blog/Blog.html