Recently Google added Street View content for major cities in Italy and France their mapping and geography products. Both Google Earth and Google Maps have this new content. I recently spent some time with our 5th grade students exploring this new content and the ability to view cities such as Rome and Paris in this detail provides another tremendous tool for teachers when studying geography and social studies. Also in addition to the new Street View content Google also recently announced a new Ancient Rome layer to Google Earth. This new layer was produced by the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and contains over 6,700 3 dimensional building and 250 Google Earth placemarks. The ability to have students visually see the scale and structure of these buildings, while at the same time being able to utilize the measurement tools built in to Google Earth can lead to some interesting discussions and with these types of tools teachers can construct lessons and challenges that allow their students to approach this work in new ways that would not be possible with just a picture in a book. The depth of content associated with Google Earth and Google Maps continues to astonish me and I encourage teachers to take a close look at these exciting tools.
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