Exploring the Olympics on Google Earth and Google Maps

If you've been watching the Olympic Games and wondering how you might incorporate them in your classroom, here are couple of resources to investigate.

The Google Earth Blog has published a short list of Google Earth tours based on the Olympic Games in London. The list includes a fly-over tour of the marathon route, Street View imagery of the Olympic Park, and 3D models of some of the Olympic venues.

Google's London 2012 page includes a Google Map showing the distribution of Olympic medals. Visitors can see the distribution of medals according to medal color and country.

Applications for Education
When I saw the Google Map of medal distribution I immediately thought of a simple geography lesson. Students can browse for medal winners in other countries then research those countries. To take it a step further, you might ask students to investigate why a country produces exceptional athletes in a given sport. For example, you might challenge students to find out why South Korea excels at archery.

Larry Ferlazzo has a large list of Olympic resources going, I encourage you to check out Larry's list. 

Follow the Olympic Torch Relay

Image via Sureloc.com

The Olympic flame is flying to Cornwall today to begin the 8,000 mile relay around the UK before arriving at the Olympic Games later this summer. The relay begins tomorrow morning. You can see the plane and how the flame is transported in these images from the BBC. To keep track of the where the Olympic flame is on a given day, visit the Olympic Torch Relay Map on the London 2012 site.

The BBC also has a good map with pictures of all of the locations that Olympic Torch will pass through over the next seventy days. The BBC also has a nice gallery of past Olympic Torch designs accompanied by a bit of information each design, the host nation, and or that year's Olympic games.

For more resources about the 2012 Summer Olympic Games I recommend seeing the list that Larry Ferlazzo has started.

And if you're wondering about the picture above, it's of my long-time friend Butch Johnson who has competed in five Olympic Games and is currently in the running to make a sixth consecutive US Olympic Archery Team at the age of 56.

Olympic Challenge 2012 - Olympics-inspired Lessons

Through a Tweet from Jen Deyenberg earlier this week I learned about a neat collaborative project started by Chris Leach. Olympic Challenge 2012 is a series of academic challenges based upon Summer Olympic events. Right now there are twenty-two challenges proposed. Teachers can sign-up to have their students "challenge" other classrooms. Or you could simply have your students try the challenges without challenging another classroom. Here's one of the fun challenges in the list; Tennis: draw faces on tennis balls and then animate them to tell a story.