Google Geo-Education Summit

A very inspiring day on Friday at the Google offices in London talking about the future of Google’s geo-applications to education (Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Sky).

It was a very informative and thought-provoking day with a reallly good group. Noel Jenkins, of Juicy Geography fame, spoke about his fantastic work on using Google Earth as a basis for developing in-depth enquiries (diamond trade, siting wind-farms, scenario-planning for San Francisco, etc.). Richard Treves from Southampton University, spoke amongst other things about the need for good design in Google Earth (more at his Google Earth Design blog). Also there were Ollie Bray, a great proponent of web 2.0 in Scotland, Martin Law from Teaching and Learning Scotland, Steve Bruce, Head of Education and Outdoor Learning at the Royal Geographical Society, Ed Parsons, Geo-spatial Technologist for Google and Tina Ornduff, from the Google Geo-Education team in California (a big thank you to her for organising the day).

Both Noel and Ollie have already blogged about the day, but both the day and their blogs have reminded me of several developments in new Google tools for education that I will mention in separate posts.