Google Earth Tour of James Cook's Exploration of Australia

Well-constructed Google Earth tours can be excellent multimedia alternatives to textbooks. One such example of this is a collection of Google Earth files about Captain James Cook's exploration of Australia and New Zealand. The files contain animations and audio explanations of Cook's explorations of the coastlines of Australia and New Zealand. I learned about these files from the Google Earth Blog. You can read more about the construction of these files on the Google Earth Blog.

Download Cook's Exploration of Australia (warning, it's a very large file).
Download Cook's Circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Download Cook's Circumnavigation of South Island, New Zealand.

Applications for Education
These files could provide helpful audio and visual aids for teachers of history and world geography.

AudioViator - Free Audio Tours of Cities and Landmarks

AudioViator is an excellent collection of audio tours of cities and landmarks all over the globe. All of the tours that I previewed are Creative Commons licensed and available to download for free. You can search for audio tours by keyword or use the map to browse for free audio tours. I used the map to find audio tours of Boston's Freedom Trail and Mount Rushmore.

Applications for Education
If you're taking your students on a field trip, take a look at AudioViator to find an audio tour that your students can use while on that field trip or in preparation for it. You could also use the audio tour files as part of a Google Earth tour. For example, you could take the Mount Rushmore audio file then have students create a visual tour in Google Earth to match the audio tour.

Tuna and Terns - View Their Migrations in Google Earth

I've featured some resources from the Encyclopedia of Life in the past (here and here) and today I'd like to point out a couple of new things from EOL that I learned about through the Google Earth Blog. The Encyclopedia of Life has offered Google Earth files for a while. Two new (to me anyway) files that could be useful for science teachers are tours of Bluefin Tuna and Arctic Tern migration patterns.

The video below is of the Bluefin Tuna tour.


Applications for Education
The Encyclopedia of Life tours could be good supplements to your textbook information about migratory animals. Rather than just looking at the migration patterns students can learn a little about how the patterns are studied and why those animals migrate.