Sometimes a tired old classroom globe just won’t do for a middle-school geography lesson at the dawn of the 21st century. That’s why, during STS 99, students drawn from dozens of schools the world ‘round are participating in a project to give them, literally, the freshest global view of our planet. Called EarthKam, the project allows middle-school students to take digital photographs of the world from the orbiting space shuttle – images that are then beamed into their classrooms via the internet mere hours after they have been snapped.