One Trick Pony

I’m pretty excited about this week’s announcement about a newly released layer in Google Earth. Ancient Rome 3D contains hundreds of buildings, some with interiors, as they appeared on June 21, 320 A.D. Many of the buildings have notes attached with background information. It’s an amazing accomplishment!

As with many rich resources, it’s not really educational until someone devises something to DO with it. As Maria Muldaur once sang, it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion. Like Second Life, it’s a virtual world waiting for something purposeful to happen with it. Google is encouraging creative teachers to come up curriculum to bring their 3D Rome to life by sponsoring a contest with some pretty nice prizes. Next Spring when the winners are announced, we’re going to see some terrific lessons.

My head is buzzing with ideas for wrapping a WebQuest around this. What might the task be? Create a short play using the buildings as backdrop and put it into Comic Life? Write the diary of a Roman citizen and illustrate it with pictures and descriptions of the spaces that he would pass through? Form a commission for the reconstruction of lost buildings and make a recommendation for the single ruin to be brought back to life? Analyze the types of buildings and their locations and invent a taxonomy that relates the two?

I’m going to recommend this to my pre-service teacher class as a possible platform for the WebQuest they’re about to start work on.  Could be fun!

Hats off to Google for investing in things like this.