Magnalox is a web-based application that brings a GPS track to life. Simply download and save your track from a GPS and upload it to Magnalox (“magnificent GPS logs and interactive reports”) The application will transform your track into an animated map that reproduces your journey. Elevation data is displayed as an accompanying graph, and the “killer feature” is the option to add notes and pictures from the journey into the finished log. This is a fantastic way to record field trips. I have produced a short magnalog of my local block with photographs. You can also view the magnalog on Google Earth or on a Google Map.
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
A quick big-up for a new dynamic overlay for Google Earth that adds the OS national gridlines. The link is obtainable via this post. It works well for me, as you zoom in the grid squares are gradually replaced until you are viewing at 1km scale. I think that this could be a useful demonstration for students.
Earth Browser makes a great backdrop for using webcams in the classroom. Although it comes with hundreds of webcams, it’s very easy to add your own.
Start by searching for webcams on Google, for example Antarctica webcams. Here for example I’ll add the camera at Mawson Station.
Start Earth Browser and click Options and Webcam list to open the Edit Webcam dialogue. Then click New, and select the country, in this case Antarctica. The Nearest Location drop down box alllows you to locate the webcam symbol accurately, though if necessary you can use latitude and longitude co-ordinnates. Add a title for the camera, for example Mawson research station and then paste the URL of the camera’s web page into the Webpage URL box. Finally locate the actual image URL by right-clicking on the webcam image itself and selecting Properties. Copy the information listed under Address (Internet Explorer) or Location (Firefox) into the Image URL box and then click Add to finish the process.
The webcam will now be safely stored in Earth Browser’s database. If you cutomize Earth Browser heavily, you might want to save the settings (File / Export Settings) to a safe place, in case you have to reinstall the program in the future.
Touchgraph is an extraordinary way to discover relationships between web sites using Google. Instructions are here.
This is the second idea for using a hand-held GPS in a classroom.
Get the students in small groups to draw out a word or phrase on graph paper. They convert the word to vectors, for example North 20m, South 10m, West 10m, South 10m. They can use the GPS to try and follow each other’s co-ordinates and discover the original words as they are revealed on the GPS “bread-crumb” track display. This idea might be a bit fiddly with a GPS without an electronic compass.
A variation on this idea would be to get students to walk around a large open space to create huge virtual words in the GPS tracklog. These can be uploaded into Easy GPS, edited and saved as a GPX file, and from there into Google Earth or Google Maps, via GPS Visualizer
Download Google Earth example file
This idea is still rather conceptual! I need to tie it into some actual learning objectives. Observing your virtual graffiti from space is quite cool though.
Update 30/4/06 I’ve found the GPS Drawing web site, which takes the whole concept further.
This was recently mentioned in an SLN thread. I have put together a simple spreadsheet to plot wave buoy data at the Sevenstones lightship. Using a spreadsheet to harvest the latest data in this way is a compelling prospect, however at present I can’t think of a practical application!
Open the spreadsheet and select “enable macros”. After a few seconds the graph will change automatically to reflect the current readings from the lightship.
Click on chart to download spreadsheet
Sevenstones lightship
© National Maritime Museum, London
Thanks to Rowser for his assistance with the method. This page is a helpful intoduction to web queries.
I’ve just managed to do this and here is the result. The resulting map combines various annotated photos, Google Earth models and a panoramic image, and was used to support a field trip to London.
My thanks to Google Maps EZ and Digitally Distributed Environments. I see this as a step forward in creating custom Google Maps for classroom teaching.
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