Archive for April, 2006

Teaching with GPS

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 30, 2006 in GPS and Google Maps. 2 Comments

gps

I have written an article about teaching with GPS, which can be found at Juicy Geography. The page includes links to some Google Maps I prepared that show how GPS Visualizer can be used to plot fieldwork data.
GPS Visualizer seems to grow new features each week and is a brilliant application for displaying yourGPS data.. The other essential utility featured is Easy GPS. I hadn’t realized until recently that it now manages GPS tracks as well as routes and waypoints. Both these programs are free.

Juicy Geography mobile

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 23, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth, ICT and Photographs. 0 Comments

I have added the first of my Yellow Arrows to two locations in North Devon that are important to me. The others will be used in a Geography/Art collaboration
project.

This is the very first arrow:

shop

 There are lots of surf shops in North Devon, the arrow is placed on the window of the only shop manufacturing surfboards locally. If you’re in Braunton, text the code on the arrow to the SMS number provided, for a personal message!

This arrow has been placed somewhere on a beach. I’m not saying which beach, or where the arrow is located, but it’s not hard to find!

beachyellow
There’s a message for weekend / London surfers to be discovered.

Tomorrow I will be moblogging directly from a GCSE fieldtrip on Exmoor, (providing there’s an Orange signal!) I will also be testing some handheld GPS units and Phone2GEarth as well. The idea is to use the the phone to locate and photograph the fieldwork sites. The phone images will be geotagged in the evening.

The moblog link is here

The handheld GPS units will be used in conjunction with a traditional gun clinometer to measure the gradient of the river bed and the valley sides. The results will be available on this site in .gpx format so that they can be viewed in GPS Visualizer. It will be interesting to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional method compared to the modern.

Phone2GEarth

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 17, 2006 in GPS and Google Earth. 2 Comments

I’ve tried out a little mobile phone application called “Phone 2 Google Earth” The program communicates with a bluetooth GPS and records your position at regular intervals for as long as required. You can also record placemarks. The data is saved as a KML file, which can be transferred from the phone to a PC. Here is an example google earth file .

llamasclick to enlarge

The llamas featured as a placemark can be seen on my moblog.

The colour and opacity of the track can be modified once it has been imported to Google Earth via the advanced tab. It would be nice if there was an option to output the data as a GPX file which would preserve other aspects of the GPS log, such as speed and altitude, giving you the choice as to whether to use Google Earth or GPS Visualizer to view the data. As a basic tracking program however, Phone2GEarth works very well, and I’ll use it for fieldwork.

Experiments in moblogging

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 12, 2006 in ICT and Photographs. 0 Comments

I’m having a break from this blog for a few days while I investigate the potential of moblogging for geography fieldwork.

moblog
I have set up a sandbox moblog here, and I’m using a Blogger site to post about my progress. When you think about it, the ability to travel somewhere, take a picture and write a few words, then in seconds, publish on the internet is pretty amazing. Well it is to me anyway!

New USGS website for San Francisco earthquake studies

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 7, 2006 in Google Earth and Teaching resources. 1 Comment

The USGS has just announced a really useful new web-based resource that uses Google Earth to visualize a vast quantity of spatial data about the earthquake hazard in San Francisco.

San Francisco historicalclick to enlarge

The files can be downloaded seperately, and some will replace the data files I made for my own San Francisco decision making exercise This was my best lesson from this year, and the new USGS resources will complement the task very well. I will be revising this activity in light of the new developments.

Thanks to Google Earth blog

EarthPlot software

Published by Noel Jenkins on April 4, 2006 in GPS, Google Earth and ICT. 1 Comment

I’ve just noticed that Earth Plot have released Earth Paint. I’ve had a quick go and I’m very impressed at the ease with which you can draw freehand shapes and polygons onto Google Earth. Third party applications such as Earth Paint and GPS Visualizer seem to have made Google Earth Plus somewhat redundant.