Google Earth Timeline

During a Planning meeting last week with one of my schools we were looking over some of the layers available on Google Earth and the information that you can get from them and we noticed something that was new to us.  It may not be new to anyone else but we thought it was very interesting. 

What we noticed was that there was a date in the bottom left side of the window when we were viewing our location in Google Earth.  When we clicked on the date (1993) in the upper left side of the viewing area appeared the Historical Time Slider.  It was very interesting to be able to go to a location on the map and then go back in time to see what the area looked like years before.  We were able to look at the school location that we were at and see what the area looked like before the school was even built.  There were even some photos showing the process of the school being built which the teachers thought was very neat and felt there students would enjoy it as well.

It was very interesting to show it to the students when they came back into the classroom.  They were wide eyed and happy to see that they could walk up to the ActivBoard in the classroom and move the earth to the area they wanted to see and then zoom into it or type in the location they wanted to visit and have the program pull back and then zoom back in to their destination.  They were able to then use the time line to go back in time to see what the area looked like in the past.  Now so far the limit for the time line is back to 1993 but in some cases that is enough to see what an area looked like 10 years earlier or before the students were born.

Again I might be behind the time in seeing this feature but we were all having a great deal of fun using it with the students in the classroom.

images taken using ActivInspire Camera Tool of Google Earth Time Line Tool