The flight from Fairbanks was a nice one, not too much out of the ordinary except that the front of the plane was blocked off to hold cargo, and the back half was reserved for passengers. The only way to get goods to Barrow, the most northern point of the United States, is by plane or by barge. The scenery between Fairbanks and Barrow was beautiful to say the least. First there were tall evergreens poking through fires of yellow leaves coating the many mountain ranges, then the land was flat and the landscape was dotted with round lakes and sinewy river paths. I saw no roads. Then we landed on the top of the world, Barrow, Alaska.
I asked a few groups of students to describe their favorite part of the day's lessons. Their answer was always enthusiastically the same – the flight simulator in Google Earth. They also enjoyed learning how to discover content by zooming in and out of places in Google Earth and turning on different layers. They said the elephants in Africa (referring to Michael Fay's Africa flyover in the National Geographic layer) and that measuring the length of hippos in Smoots was also fun.
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