GUILDERLAND — Remember the rolled-up paper maps that social studies teachers would try to pull down like a movie screen, only to have them fall off and clatter onto the floor? Those are pretty much a thing of the past, says Farnsworth Middle School eighth-grade social studies teacher Keir Aspin. They have been replaced by tools like Google Earth, he says.

Google Earth was transitioning from an application that needed to be installed to a tool that could be accessed on the web, said Natalia LeMoyne, the district’s coordinator for instructional technology; it needed a few schools around the world to test out ways that its content could be used in a real classroom, LeMoyne said.

Last year, Farnsworth was one of just four schools in the world selected by Google Earth and National Geographic to experiment with ways that teachers might use the digital content the two companies had created together. The other schools are in Austin, Texas; Lisle, Illinois; and Ottawa, Ontario.

Three Farnsworth teachers — reading teacher Lisa McClure and social studies teachers Aspin in eighth grade and Jamie Mullins in seventh grade — have used “A Storytelling Odyssey.” The interactive tool offers a close look at the 10-year, 21,000-mile trek currently being taken by reporter Paul Salopek, who is following, on foot, the pathways taken by the first humans to venture out of Africa. He is walking — with occasional boat trips as needed — up from Africa, through the Middle East, across Asia, and then down the western coasts of North and South America. Every 100 miles, he pauses to record his observations in blog posts and to take videos and panoramic photos.

Kids can access all of these materials and follow in Salopek’s footsteps.

Mullins said her students first used geographic features of Google Earth to look at some of the terrain Salopek would travel. The kids quickly realized, Mullins said, that some of the locations were so remote that it was impossible to access street views of them online.

After exploring Salopek’s trip, Mullins said, she asked her students to pick anywhere in the world that they had always wanted to see, and explore it using Google Earth street views. Some of  her students who are adopted from overseas picked the countries of their birth, she said.

Aspin asked his eighth-graders to use street view to journey digitally on a route that they could take to walk from their homes to Crossgates Mall and to keep a journal, noting any signs of evidence of human activity — mailboxes, houses, roads — that they see along the way.

Aspin mentioned wishing there were a way to use the technology for “time travel”: to explore maps and street scenes of, say, a meticulously recreated 1920s New York.

He has used Google Earth in class, Aspin said, to help kids understand the role geography plays in history. He teaches American history from 1865 to the present, and when his students were learning about Andrew Carnegie’s choice of Pittsburgh as the location for his steel mills, Aspin had them look at Pittsburgh on Google Earth. The confluence of three rivers there was what made it possible for Carnegie to bring in the necessary limestone, iron ore, and coal for his mills. “Geography chose Pittsburgh!” Aspin said.

Aspin explained that the old game of spinning a globe, placing your finger on a random spot when it stops, and then dreaming of traveling there has been replaced by a feature on Google Earth. In this feature, called “I’m Feeling Lucky,” visitors to the site click on an icon of a gambling die and the tool then selects for them a random place on the Earth, dramatically zooming over to it in a satellite view that locates it on a world map, give a bit of information from Wikipedia about it, and allows for moving in for a close-up street view.

Mullins, who teaches American history through 1865, said she wishes she could design a virtual field map, tracing the route that Washington’s troops would have marched — “some of them in bare feet in the wintertime,” she said — if not the way it would have looked then, at least showing the distance, with embedded images of the time period.

LeMoyne, who is also a certified trainer and innovator for Google for Education, said that at conferences she often shows people how to layer in other information into Google Earth. For instance, she said, she has gone to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website and gotten a file there of all the industries discharging chemicals into the Hudson River, and shown educators how they can lay it over a map of the area to discuss pollution with students in a way that makes it seem very real.

As test teachers, they have passed these suggestions on to Google Earth and National Geographic.