Charlie's blog, stardate 2/21/2021: This week the continuing adventures of the starship Charlielearning brought us back to Earth, exploring and learning about this planet with the bold new Google Earth, and Maps, and other apps.

Google Earth is much more than a mapping program. There are embedded Wikipedia articles about locations, photographs, entire exploration activities about important sites and events. The application has a function where the user can collect resources of a variety of types and present them to others (like students) in one location to further understanding of topics and their locations.

For me at home, Google Earth was ponderous and slow to respond to interfaces. Google Maps on the other hand can handle scrolling and zooming much better. The satellite image function can place a great deal of information at the hands of our students.

I tried out Auto Draw and plan on using it imminently in class for students to model concepts and show relationships. It is much easier in ways than Google Drawing but does not have features like grids and rulers like other drawing applications. The auto draw feature makes much cleaner drawings than other drawing apps, especially when using a mouse to draw, as the app looks at what you are drawing and suggests a clip art image to insert.

Toontastic is an application that I will experiment with to see how easily my students pick up how to use it. It appears to allow the user to create and animate drawings and images which has many possible uses in science class. The Next Generation Science Standards regularly call for students to model concepts and show relationships between components and movement of energy and matter. Toontastic seems to be able to do these things in a compelling and effective way. Cartoon animation is still engaging to middle school students and this app could make science learning more effective.