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The Challenge:

You must have heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. From my experience, a picture is also worth a thousand ideas, a thousand questions, a thousand student exchanges and a thousand possibilities.  Where can you find pictures that will get students into the thousands?

A Solution:

NASA, on the website Earth Observatory, has a huge treasure of online publicly available libraries of pictures that can be used to get your children/students thinking. These pictures can be jumping off points for deep learning and thinking. If you click on Images at the top left of the Earth Observatory website beside the magnifying glass, you can see the nine photo categories (Atmosphere, Heat, Human, Land, Life, Natural Event, Remote Sensing, Snow & Ice, Water). Students can explore categories that are of particular interest. You can have a student or group choose a photo that intrigues them; they can then investigate what the story is behind the picture. For example, if a student chose the photo below, they could list questions about the pictures. For example: 1) Where is it located? 2) What is the elevation? 3) How do the two photos compare? and 4) What could cause the differences observed? Imagine the possibilities when you give your students the freedom to choose a favorite image and formulate their own questions? At the top of the website, next to the “Images” link, there is the link to Global Maps. Each map possesses criteria (snow cover, net radiation, fire, total rainfall etc). There are sixteen global map criteria and these maps are awesome. Each one has a slide bar that shows the change in the criteria over many years. There is also a link to articles and blogs (including interesting puzzle challenges).  There are many more resources in the NASA Earth Observatory.  Check out the link and enjoy it with your student(s).

Resources:

• NASA Earth Observatory:  https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

  NASA Visible Earth: https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/  : Another collection of photos and animation of our planet