Geography and history lessons with Google Earth

While doing our editing work on the material that my father Eugeniusz Tytyk left us to publish as a book about his 5 years spent in the Nazi concentration camps and prisons, we were looking for related online resources as well as books, magazines, maps, etc.

Readers of my father's "Living Shadows" book have another resource or rather tool created by Google - Google Earth that is included in Google Pack.

I highly recommend downloading that program and playing with it. You can easily visit the places where Eugeniusz was imprisoned, his trips with so called "transports" when the Nazis were sending him from one camp to the other, where he was born, where he lived, etc. It's a great educational tool for children, too - to learn both history and geography.

Google Earth is like a whole interactive atlas inside your computer, created by using satellite imagery. You can point and zoom to anyplace on the planet that you would like to visit. The program uses Google search to show local points of interest and facts and provides addresses of local businesses such as hotels and restaurants as well as driving directions.

It takes some time to learn using Google Earth, but it really is worthwhile. Unfortunately, this program is not available yet in every country and the detail of presentation varies from country to country.

The whole world is covered with medium resolution imagery and terrain data and you will be able to see not only major geographic features, but also man-made developments such as towns, although not detail of individual buildings.

However, additional high-resolution imagery details for individual buildings are available for most of the major cities in the US, Western Europe, Canada, and the UK! You can see 3D buildings in 38 US cities and detailed road maps for the US, Canada, the UK, and Western Europe.

Will you be able to use Google Earth? Most probably, as it takes advantage of the 3D graphics capabilities that are now standard on most computers. If you have graphics card from the following manufacturers, you should be fine: NVIDIA, ATI, 3D Labs, Intel, Matrox, and S3.

Good luck and have fun with Google Earth!

Ilona

P.S. In my Squidoo lens about my father I listed a number of links to the best resources on the Internet that give 3D/panoramic views of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Please look at the "Auschwitz Documentary" module.


Technorati tags: Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, political prisoner, WWII, Holocaust, Nazi camps, concentration camps, death camps, Nazis, Google Earth, Squidoo lens, Eugeniusz Tytyk