NEW YORK LANDSCAPE REGIONS IN GOOGLE EARTH: A COMPREHENSIVE TEACHING TOOL

New York State's Core Curriculum in Earth Science includes the study of the physiographic landscape regions of the state. In response to a solicitation by the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) and the Digital Water Education Library (DWEL) to expand the recently developed NY Instructional Collection, Dr. James R. Ebert (SUNY Oneonta) and Steve Kluge (Fox Lane HS and Purchase College, SUNY) assembled a select group of NY Earth Science teachers to develop a set of comprehensive Google Earth tours of New York's 12 landscape regions. Over the course of the spring of 2006, participants gathered information and took photos of various aspects of each of NY's landscape regions, and developed Google Earth tours incorporating geologic and environmental features, topographic and geologic map overlays, photos, notes, and classroom activities specific to each region. In early July of 2006, the developers met at SUNY Oneonta to develop and finalize the format of individual projects, and to collate them into a final project. “NY Landscape Regions in Google Earth” is accessible/downloadable from a single web page cataloged at www.dlese.org's NY Instructional Collection, and at http://www.bedford.k12.ny.us/flhs/science/geoscience/skluge/dlesege/default.html. It is the group's hope that others will expand this project to other areas of the country and world using our organization model and methods as a starting point.