The Google Earth 101 has started off well, with close to 50 participants joining the course in the first few days. It seems as though the wiki’s and screencast areas are a big hit, whereas the discussion areas have barely been touched. There have been no changes to the topical wikis, where I had hoped to see some changes. You cannot force community on to participants in any online course, so I am thinking of adding a weekly synchronous chat to get some cross-pollination of GE ideas going and hopefully inspire some asynchronous discussion.

I am just finishing up another short 1-2 hour workshop on Cyberbullying 101 that I will make available in the Moodle courses. Unfortunately, it is a little tricky to get audio and video segments (with regards to copyright) that are appropriate and that I can pull into this new course, so it is mostly textual with resource documents, feeds and PDF’s. If you have any classroom stories about cyberbullying that you would like to share, or useful resources, please let me know.

Now available! (for as long as I can afford the bandwidth)

This introductory course takes educators through the basics of using Google Earth’s Free Version and looks at classroom integration ideas from K-12. There are over 40 minutes of online videos for educators to familiarize themselves with the application, as well as different opportunities for educators to collaborate through topic specific wiki’s, discussions, and potential synchronous chats.

Feeds from topic specific blogs, a large directory of Google Earth files and a curriculum ideas and resource wiki are just a few of the resource that you will find in this course.

What makes this course different form other online courses is the ability to modify the course content and change the direction of the course through the use of topical wiki’s, discussion and synchronous chats.

When you have completed the course try the different quizzes and see if you have what it takes to be a Google Earth Edumaster.

1. Register for free at: http://www.teachinghacks.com/moodle/login/signup.php

2. To enrol in the course you will need the enrolment key: googleearth101