Mr. Higgins’ Blog

I’m a mathematics and computer science teacher, but my first love was geography and weather.  I used to, besides eating cottage cheese, draw maps all of the time of the world, the United States, and just about anything that had to do with latitude and longitude.  From the age of 3 to around 7, I would watch pretty much only the weather channel.  So when I saw the “Around the World in 80 minutes” segment at the k12 online conference, just to give it a whirl.

I had some extra time at the end of one of my programming classes and told my students about Google Earth and Flash Earth.   I challenged the students to find me a picture of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas.  The Stratosphere has a roller coaster at the very top of the tall structure.  The students spent the next ten minutes searching the entire area of Las Vegas for a roller coaster looking building.

The next day, I made a comment about latitude and longitude of the Stratosphere.  Eventually the students realized that using forums or online mapping software to find the actual latitude and longitude is more effective.  I realized that my students were learning.  In the future year of teaching, I need to embrace this in my web development classes.

Picture of Stratosphere on Flash Earth…