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. 

History and Olympics Lesson Plan

The Olympics are over until 2012, but your students may be talking about it for a few more weeks. The Olympics provides teachers with a some teaching opportunities in math, world cultures, and history. The Olympic Medal Map from the New York Times has an interactive timeline of the modern Olympics. For each year on the timeline the circles representing each country expand or contract according to medal count.

Application for Education
The Olympic Medal Map provides students and teachers with an interesting way to look at 20th Century World History. Students should notice the size of the circles representing Asian countries expanding over the course of century while many of the circles representing European countries contract. This pattern of change could be the stimulus for having students examine causes and possible explanations for the changes over the course of century.