After showing her how to navigate the controls for zooming in and out and panning across the continents we toured the globe and identified each of the continents. She chose to look at images from Asia first and started zooming in until Panaramio's blue square icons came into view. Clicking on the icon opened a photograph of people or landmarks. She then had to decide if the image met the criteria for the assignment. Clicking on the image a second time opened the image in a web browser. We created a notebook for her photos in Zoho Notebook and then dragged the image into the notebook using the Zoho Notebook browser extension. (Side note: I prefer Google Notebook, but they have discontinued support for the browser extension). Update: a Google Notebook extension for FireFox v. 3.5 can be found here.
Soon she was exploring on her own, finding interesting photos and adding them to her notebook. She noticed that many areas didn't have photos available which led to a discussion about the natural features like deserts and mountains and why people live closer to water and coastlines. Afterwards, we looked at her notebook and picked out the photos that best fit the criteria before printing.
I was impressed by how quickly she adapted to the use of the mouse for navigating in Google Earth, her ability to work in multiple applications at once, and her critical thinking skills for selecting appropriate photographs.
