How to Create an Around the World With Google Earth Tour

The Amazing Race is the only reality game show that I've watched with interest for as long as it has been on television. Years ago I created a classroom game based on the same premise of the show. This spring I updated that game with some new graphics and new challenges and then published it as a PDF on PracticalEdTech.com. 

Recording a Google Earth tour is the capstone activity in Around the World With Google Earth. There are a couple of ways that students can do that. Students who are using the desktop version of Google Earth can use the built-in recorder. Students who are using the web version of Google Earth can use a screencasting tool like Screencastify to record a tour. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to record a Google Earth tour in your web browser by using Screencastify. 

Worldle Daily - A Street View Game

The Wordle craze seems to have settled down a bit since its height earlier this year (or at least fewer people are sharing their scores on social media). That hasn't stopped developers from creating many variations on the game. One such variation that I recently tried is Worldle Daily. 

Worldle Daily is a combination of the Wordle concept and Google Street View imagery. The game is played by looking at a featured Street View image then trying to guess, by clicking on a map, where in the world that image was captured. After each guess you're shown how far away you are from being correct. A circle covering the area in which the image was taken is also displayed after each guess. As you get closer, the circle gets smaller until you either use up all of your guesses or guess correctly. 

Here's my short video overview of how to play Worldle Daily. 

Applications for Education
Worldle Daily is free to play and doesn't require registration in order to play it. Playing the game could be a fun way for students to practice using the context clues in Street View imagery to identify places around the world. Likewise, it could be a fun way to discover new and interesting landmarks. For example, today's correct answer featured a giant cowboy statue on Route 66 in Oklahoma.

Learning How to Tell Time on Analog Clocks and Watches

My oldest daughter got a little analog wristwatch for her birthday a few days ago. So far she loves wearing it (she wanted to wear it to bed last night) and is rather quickly learning how to tell time with it. As you might expect, the watch has prompted a few questions including "how does it work?" If you students or children of your own who need to learn how to tell time on an analog watch, here are a couple of good resources to explore. 

ABCya offers a free game called the Time Travel Game that is designed to help student practice telling time. The concept of the game is that students are given a prompt like "set the clock to 4am" and they have to move the hands of the clock to the correct position. Each level of the game contains ten prompts. A little rocket ship is launched when they correctly answer the ten prompts on a level. I played the game this morning and I would highly recommend that students either play it on a touch screen or use a mouse rather than a trackpad to move the hands of the clock in the game. 

What Time Is It? is an activity book template available from Canva. The template has ten pages. Each page has a clock on it and a prompt like "it's eleven." Students have to draw in the hands of the clock to match the prompt on the page. As this is a Canva template, you can make a copy and modify it for your students' needs. 

Animagraffs has a popular video that explains how a mechanical watch works. The animations combined with the voiceover make it easy to understand how the parts of a watch work together to keep time. 

Read Write Think Animal Inquiry

This morning I'm taking my daughters to a little petting zoo near our home. They love to pet the goats, sheep, ponies, horses, and bunnies. Both of my daughters love learning about animals and they are both learning to write right now. Thinking about those things reminded me of a writing template hosted by Read Write Think.

Read Write Think's Animal Inquiry template is an online graphic organizer template that students fill in as they learn about animals and or fill in from memory. It's a simple template that doesn't require students to sign-up or sign into any kind of account which makes it perfect for elementary school use. On the same page that you find the template you will also find some suggested lesson plans that you can access for free.

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Read Write Think's Animal Inquiry template.



Back in January Read Write Think relaunched all of their popular interactive writing templates and activities for students. Here's a list of some of my favorite RWT templates. 

A Simple Tool for Finding Related Search Keywords

Brainstorming lists of alternative words and phrases is one of the strategies that I have students use when conducting online research. Doing this before they start a search and or whenever they feel stuck can help them generate new search result pages that doesn't duplicate the results of their previous queries. But sometimes our brainstorming sessions need a little jumpstart. That's when a tool like Keyword.io can be helpful. 

On Keyword.io you can enter a search term and have a list of related search terms generated for you. These are different and more comprehensive lists than Google's default "people also search for..." suggestions. 

Applications for Education
It should be noted that Keyword.io is a service that is designed for search engine optimization and search engine marketing professionals. For that reason, you'll see a lot of ads for purchasing marketing products that Keyword.io offers. You can ignore those ads and just look at the lists that are generated for free. Those lists can help you and your students come up with some new search terms to use when conducting online research in Google, Bing, and elsewhere.

On a related note, you might also be interested in these articles that I've previously published about search strategies:

• How Excluding Words Helps to Narrow the Scope of a Search
• Five Benefits of Conducting Mind Mapping Exercises