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Virtual Globe software has become extremely popular both inside and outside of educational settings. This software allows users to explore the Earth in three dimensions while streaming satellite imagery, elevation, and other data from the Internet. Virtual Globes, such as Google Earth, NASA World Wind, and ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer can be effectively used in standards-based, inquiry-driven geography lessons. With some practice, mashups (using data from more than one source to create new data) can be constructed for practically any application or area of interest. Educators who have not already begun to use these tools may wish to investigate them to help their students to think spatially by investigating processes and places on the Earth's surface in a three-dimensional visualization environment.

The massive open online course (MOOC) is a new approach for teaching online. MOOCs stand apart from traditional online classes in that they support thousands of learners through content and assessment mechanisms that can scale. A reason for their size is that MOOCs are free for anyone to take. Here we describe the design, development, and teaching of a MOOC called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. We explore the geography of the student population, the experience of teaching a MOOC, and evaluate its impacts on learning. We conclude with several key challenges and opportunities we see for MOOCs in geography.

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Five converging global trends -geo-awareness, geo-enablement, geotechnologies, citizen science, and storytelling-have the potential to offer geography a world audience -attention from education and society that may be unprecedented in the history of the discipline. Issues central to geography are now part of the global consciousness. Everyday objects are rapidly becoming locatable, and thus able to be monitored and mapped. Many tools and data sets that were formerly used and examined only by geographers and other earth and environmental scientists are now in the hands of the general public. Citizens outside academia are becoming involved in contributing data to the scientific community. Multimedia and cloud-based Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have greatly multiplied the attraction that maps have had for centuries to tell stories. But despite these trends bringing opportunity to geography, is geoliteracy becoming increasingly valued? How can educators, researchers, and practitioners seize the opportunity that these trends seem to present to actively promote geographic content knowledge, skills, and perspectives throughout education and society?

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