Ed Tech Talk

Google Earth: The Amazing Things You Can Do Besides Finding Your House!

I recently conducted a seminar for area educators about Google Earth, http://earth.google.com. Most who attended were surprised to learn how much the program can do, beyond finding their own house.

Google Earth is an amazing program that allows you to zoom from outer space to street level in seconds, or explore the stars. You can view geographical and astronomical imagery, maps, buildings and local business information.

One of the amazing features of this program is the ability to zoom into a site and look around. In larger cities, you can actually "walk" down a street and see 3-D buildings, as if you were standing there.

For instance, if you use Google Earth to locate Mount Washington in Pittsburgh, you can actually zoom in and tilt your view down Mount Washington. In Berlin, Germany, older buildings are represented with very clear 3-D versions and the scale is so precise that you can visualize just how far it is from one location to another.

Google Earth has more great features. It combines the powerful Google search engine function with Google Maps (an alternative to MapQuest) to enable you to search for restaurants in a certain area and create door-to door-directions. Many areas include icons that you can select to connect to a specific location’s related Web site.

Soon, many large cities will incorporate even more detailed 3-D versions of buildings visible from the satellite imaging.

Following the seminar that I conducted, the biggest concern my participants had was whether the satellite images were being transmitted live to Google Earth. They're not, but could they be?