EarthView Institute Continued -- April 7

Today we have had the continuation of the EarthView Institute, which we began last week. The EarthView team is preparing eleven teachers from throughout the state to run EarthView programs on their own.

We began the day with an activity about climate classification, and discussed the relationship between climates and biomes. Once in the gym, our "Globe Wrangler" Brigitta used a small globe from the age of the dinosaurs to illustrate the movement continents resulting from plate tectonics. She later shared a lesson on the geography of Alaska, where she had lived as a child.

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The teacher participants spent time describing their own ideas about using EarthView with their students, and they practiced caring for EarthView, inflating and deflating it.

We then spent some time in the Global Education Center, a curriculum-resource room that the Department of Geography operates in conjunction with the Massachusetts Geographic Alliance. We examined both print and online resources, including Earth at Night, GeoChron, the Kony 2012 BSU blog, and the Nintendo version of Google Maps.

We also spent some time looking at patterns of air traffic. (Note: this is an accelerated summary, not in real time.)