Homeschooling: Using Google Earth to Enhance Geography and Social Study Lessons

Google Earth is an excellent tool for you, the homeschooling parent, to add to their "teaching toolbox." Finding resources for your homeschooled child can often be challenging and expensive. Encyclopedias become outdated and are costly. Trips to the library can be inefficient. Using programs like Google Earth will give your children another method of research as well as teaching them good internet usage skills.

Recently, while facilitating a social study lesson with my two homeschooled children, I realized how they struggled trying to find facts about specific geographical locations. Questions in their project included: Which state produces the most lumber? And, what is the coldest state?

In a traditional education, you would probably use a combination of an encyclopedia or atlas to find the answer to these questions. Our encyclopedia and atlas could only answer half of the questions they were to be researching. They were either outdated or just lacking the information.

While looking over their lesson I thought to myself, "The internet sure does make things like this a lot easier." Then it donned on me. Why aren't we encouraging the use of the internet for projects like this? Students all over the globe (including mine) use the internet to do research for their required term papers and essays. Why not geography and social studies?

I originally began them with Google Maps. This was pretty successful, but it was difficult to navigate sometimes, especially when looking for abstract answers. Then we turned to Google Earth. Google Earth is nothing less than amazing. Searching out abstract ideas such as "active volcanoes" becomes fun!

The graphics that are used in Google Earth are also fun for the children to see. Zooming all the way out and back in enables the kids to visualize where on the earth the specific place is. Zooming all the way in lets see things like the lava dome growing in Mount St. Helens. Filtering the layers allows the user to find other significant things in the area they are studying.

Google Earth's relationship with multiple websites such as YouTube and Wikipedia allows the student to quickly find relevant information and see pictures and video of the area and about the culture.

Google Earth takes education to a new level. Allowing a student to quickly find and visualize a specific place and learn about its culture, economy and social relationship to the rest of the world. It is a step better than an encyclopedia and atlas given its speed, accuracy and updated information.

It is also important to teach your homeschooled child how to use an encyclopedia, atlas and maps as part of their geography and social studies. One should not teach them to be dependent on the internet, yet to use it as one tool of many in their research.

When teaching your children how to research and find information on the internet, it is important to include how critical it is to verify any information that is found. Explain to them how the internet really works and how anybody can publish anything and that it is important to determine the reliability of the author and the information.

Google Earth is an awesome tool to incorporate into your homeschooling program. As internet resources grow, our children will become more and more reliant on the information presented via the internet, just as we are on a daily basis. Help them learn to navigate this powerful program and their learning curves will accelerate as well as their internet savvy.