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*** [[[ LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE on the WEB ]]] ***
This Nugget is for the teaching of latitude and longitude
in the middle grades, and for applied mathematics of circle
geometry in the senior grades.
From a globe or map, students can use or obtain the rough
latitude and longitude for a given location. For example,
they can locate the MIR splashdown of last March 23rd at 160
degrees west, 40 degrees south, after the fragments passed
over Fiji. But that's about it.
From the Web, they can:
1. obtain latitude and longitude to three or four decimal
places, enough to separate one city street from the next.
2. use that to gather geographically determined information
about their neighbourhood.
Downside... these map Web sites require fairly fast Web
access. Once you have that, here's how to do it...
1. For exact lat/long co-ordinates, use a site like MapBlast
(http://www.mapblast.com/) which covers much of North
America and Europe and some other countries. Specify your
street address, and your latitude/longitude appears in the
upper right corner of the local map.
You get more accuracy using the Canadian Treasury Board site at
though it is trickier to use. (Hint: use the Help screens!)
After fiddling with this site, I obtained the co-ordinates of my
daughter's classroom -- Latitude 48.4799° North and Longitude
123.4002° West. So accurate is this map, the co-ordinates of the
principal's office at the other end of the school are different:
48.4803° North and 123.4004° West.
2. Students can feed their exact position into other Web sites to
obtain local information of interest. For instance:
they can print out a table of the year's sunrise and
sunset (or moonrise and moonset) for their area.
-- at http://www.heavens-above.com, they can find out
when the International Space Station and other bright
satellites will be visible in their evening sky, or print
the current sky chart of the stars and planets.
3. Older students can explore the relationship between
fractional kilometers of distance and fractional degrees
of latitude/longitude in their area. Latitude and
distance have an unchanging relationship, but the
longitude-kilometer relation varies, and can be unraveled
using sines and cosines of one's latitude.
Thanks to Kathy Schrock's "S.O.S" listserv at
U.S. Navy site giving sunrise and sunset.
----------------------
Network Nuggets is a free service of the Community Learning
Network Website (http://www.cln.org/) and the Open Learning Agency
of British Columbia (http://www.openschool.bc.ca/), with funding
from the B.C. Ministry of Education (http://www.gov.bc.ca/bced/).
We send these announcements to subscribers of CLN's Network Nuggets,
to inform them about potentially useful educational resources on
the Internet-- but we can't guarantee that these resources will be
valuable and without frustrations.
To Subscribe/Unsubscribe:
Dave Rogers, Moderator of Network Nuggets
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