Exploring Europe with Google Earth

Activity Introduction

An image related to the continents is projected, and questions such as the following are posed:

• What does the projected image represent?

• Which continents can you identify?

Using Google Earth, the European continent is then projected, and several of its countries are referenced. A polygon is drawn in the application to outline the European continent, representing both its land and maritime borders (click the indicated button in the image to perform the task).

Image

Students are asked whether they have ever visited a European country.

• Why did they leave Portugal? Was it for holidays, sightseeing, visiting relatives…?

• Do they have relatives in any European country? Which one(s)?

  The names of the countries mentioned by the students are written on the board so they can be later researched using Google Earth.

Activity Development

Students are divided into groups of three, and each group is given a laptop with a computer mouse.

Using the Google Earth application, the teacher demonstrates how to search for locations using the term “Mangualde”.

Students are asked to launch Google Earth on their computers and search for their local area.

They are then asked to search for the countries previously mentioned and listed on the board. It is suggested that they use Google Street View to explore, for example, the streets and buildings of a capital city from one of the mentioned countries.

The flags of six countries are presented (Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and England), and students are asked to identify the country each flag belongs to.

Next, students are informed that it is possible to insert placemarks in Google Earth and associate images (e.g., flags) with those placemarks. The teacher demonstrates this using the classroom computer and provides a step-by-step guide (Student Guide – Part I).

Students are then instructed to access a folder on their desktop containing images of country flags. They are asked to insert placemarks in Google Earth for the mentioned countries and to associate each placemark with the corresponding flag image.

Image

In the mentioned folder, there are images of mountain ranges (Serra da Estrela and Serra da Freita), rivers (Douro, Tejo, and Dão), forests (Buçaco and Gerês), and deserts (Tabernas, Spain; Oltenian Sahara, Romania). Students are asked to insert markers with the images in their respective locations. The students are then questioned if they know other rivers, mountains, etc., and some answers are recorded on the board that the class can use to search for images (for example, on Wikimedia Commons, a collection of freely usable images), save them to the desktop, and insert them as markers in their respective locations.

Activity Conclusion

The students present their markers on Google Earth to the whole class, as well as the results they obtained from solving the mathematical problem.