**** Classroom Activity ****
"Where on Earth is our school?"

Target audience:
- elementary school / middle school
- geography lession

Requirements:
- Google Earth installed
- large display (projector?)
- ability to toggle on and off different layers
- students must understand how to read basic maps and interpret
satellite images as pictures of the ground from above

Goal:
- familiarize students with physical and administrative terrain local
to the school site at every scale

Process:
- launch google earth on machine connected to projector (only
pictures, no overlay data)
- identify display as a computerized version of familiar globe
- use bookmark feature to transition directly to close view of school
site with classroom (with classroom marked)
- identify familiar features of the school (playing field, parking
lot, quad, classrooms)
- turn on roads, and other adminstrative boundaries as overlays
- identify overlays as the contents of a traditional street map
- slowly zoom out, identifying the name and center of the local
district, city, county, state, country, hemisphere, highways,
bordering adminstrative zones, well known landmarks (you should have
something to say for at roughly every power of two of zoom you perform
-- only zoom, no panning)
- spin around the globe again and communicate that a detailed tour of
any school site could be performed
- with the marker for the school hidden, ask students to guide you
back down to the school level (ask them to name AND point to  objects
to guide your search)
- now back at the school level, disable all overlays
- slowly back out again, identifying important physical terrain
features, rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, deserts, forests, AS WELL
as pointing out major cities so that students can see what cities and
other man made things really "look like"
- once fully zoomed out, spin the globe around again and quickly
identify any major terrain features (forest, mountain, desert, water,
etc) that you didnt cover in your zoom-out
- now, ask a student volunteer to (with the help of their classmates
advice) navigate back down to the school level with overlays disable
(you should reinforce the labels you mentioned before to help guide
students through familiar territory)

Commentary:
- i like the idea of playing this up as an exploration, not into
foreign territory, but into the scale-space surrounding the all-
familiar school site -- this way the not only is the google-earth-map-
reading skill learned useful, but so it the knowledge gathered by
reading the map
- i think this idea could easily be expanded into a partner-project:
have pairs of students pick some place on earth (maybe from a list you
design) and have them explore the scale-space around that location to
identify the important physical and adminsitrative terrain, students
should find at least one interesting fact to associate with each
location of interest they encounter, they should present their results
to the class in a similar tour-style as your original lesson did)

comments? email: adam@adamsmith.as