tjschu.com

Precautions:

• Beware of website bias related to religious and political agendas
• Beware of website commercialism
• Think like you're supervising an excursion

To Project or Not?
Consider whether your goals for the activity would best be met by projecting to the whole class, or sending students to the sites themselves.

After visiting Israel in 2004 to work on an archaeological dig at Hippos, I had personally realised the impact that seeing and walking the land had on my understanding of Bible stories. It's not possible to take all of our students on excursions to the Holy Land,... but we don't have to, either, thanks to the multimedia resources so easily accessed on the Internet.

Over the years since, I've gathered heaps of online resources to share with teachers in hopes that they might find creative ways to use these with their students to give them a virtual experience of walking the Holy Land.

Google Earth goes well beyond what a static two-dimensional photograph or map can offer to the study of the Bible.

Download the Google Earth application at http://earth.google.com/.

Tips for showing Google Earth:

1. Google Earth requires quite a bit of bandwidth which may limit how many people in one classroom might access it simultaneously.
2. Google Earth can use "cached memory" to improve the view the second time around. Check that your cached memory is set to the highest possible limit in Google Earth preferences. Before making a presentation, run through it once on that computer.
3. Increasing the "Fly-to-speed" in Google Earth preferences will save some bandwidth at the expense of the feeling of flying.
4. If importing .kmz or .kml files of tours, they get imported into "Temporary Places". If you want to keep these tours for later viewing, click on the item in "Places" to highlight it, and then go to "File > Save to My Places".
5. Consider assigning students the task of creating fly-by tours of biblical stories.
6. If Google Earth doesn't connect to the Internet on your school network, check if the proxy settings are set correctly in Internet Explorer.