The results of the fantasy architecture competition mentioned in the previous post have been announced, and the Spiral Tower by James was declared the winner. Digitally distributed environments has more details about the project.
The Triplet Tower, the Eco Flower and the Spiral Tower.
Congratulations to all the Year 7 students who took part, and thanks again to Dr Hudson-Smith of UCL for providing the opportunity.
I’m very grateful to Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith of digitally distributed environments for the opportunity given to a class of Year 7 students to design a fantasy building for London. Three of the winning drawings will be modelled in 3D by the team at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, ready to be imported into Google Earth.
One of the submitted designs
Look out for SketchUp. Recently acquired by Google, this software is ideal for adding 3D models to Google Earth. A free license is available for teachers, and there’s a lot of scope for cross-curriculular work with ICT and Design Technology.
I have written up some ideas for teaching about Montserrat
The relevant copyright permissions have been established now, so let me know what you think of the resources.
Following a suggestion from a colleague, I’ve made a couple of visual guides for Google Earth. They are in Word format, and therefore easily editable. I have designed them to be printed off, and then laminated back to back, to form a Google Earth mousemat.
There is a simple help sheet for beginners or primary children.
A more advanced guide covers the creation and editing of placemarks, as well as some of the simple tools and settings that students may not be familiar with.
Download advanced sheet
The help sheets may be useful for my Google Earth based lessons.
Sadly, Geobloggers is no more according to Ogle Earth. Perhaps, as someone has hopefully suggested on the Flickr forums, the Geobloggers code could be open-sourced. For those not aware, Geobloggers was a visionary application that located Flickr photos in Google Maps, and later in Google Earth too.
My favourite free alternative to Geobloggers was the GMiF Fire Fox extension which embeds Google Maps into Flickr. I welcome the latest development: Yuan. CC Maps. My geotagged Flickr photographs have a new home! It’s a really simple application that works beautifully, though not with Google Earth (yet?).
Yuan.CC Maps looks like this: (quite a big file)
In the meantime Itag offers a way to conveniently tag a location to Flickr photos, and by adding the FlickrFly script, the photgraph is viewable in Google Earth.
Google Earth blog has discovered a most interesting site that generates a personalized placemark called a GE Card. Essentially it’s a link that can be added to an email or forum post that displays the kind of information you might include in an electronic signature but within Google Earth.
GE Card generator is in French, but is quite intuitive to use and has a nifty way to locate the co-ordinates for the placemark using Google Maps.
I created the link below using the generator, and an image from Flickr.
GECard - Digital [Google Earth signature]
Once you have created your personal GE Card, it’s easy to edit the details from within Google Earth. The screenshot below shows a modified GE Card. Just right click and edit the placemark, and although a rudimentary knowledge of html could be helpful, it’s not really necessary. GE Card might make a good activity for a modern language or Geography lesson. Students could create cards to illustrate all kinds of information.
modified GE Card
Right click on the placemark and choose ‘Edit’ to see what changes were made to the HTML of the standard card.
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