Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Podcasting my GCSE lessons

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 30, 2006
in Teaching resources
. 1 Comment

As a rather time-consuming experiment. I’m thinking of recording a synopsis of each of my GCSE lessons this year as a short podcast. Hopefully this will be useful as revison for the students. The podcasts won’t have any value to others, since the content is particular to my own students. Here is one example:

Settlement Lesson 1

[audio:settlement1.mp3]

Thanks to Doug Belshaw whose podcasting guides proved very useful.

Atlas Gloves

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 30, 2006
in Google Earth
. 2 Comments

Geography teachers who like to wave their arms around a lot whilst expostulating may well be interested in Atlas Gloves. It’s an interface to Google Earth that interprets hand gestures. First announced back in May, Ogle Earth reports that the application is now ready to download. A web cam and a pair of DIY illuminated gloves are the other requirements.

atlas gloves

Update

I’m very happy to report success, though it took a long time to figure out how to get the application working. I followed advice on the Atlas Gloves forum and installed a further program called WinVDig which links a video feed to QuickTime. I had no luck until I uninstalled WinVDig and tried an earlier version. With much relief I finally got my webcam running properly and within a few minutes the gloves were on and working. For best results you need to be some distance from the webcam. The next obstacle will be setting it all up on my school laptop without the network manager finding out!
For others trying this project, I can recommend PoundLand in the UK for cheap LED keyrings. I used a Logitech QuickCam STX from PC World which came with headphones for podcasting as well! I’ve got a Windows PC with XP Pro and Google Earth 4 beta. I installed the latest version of Java and QuickTime as suggested by the Atlas Gloves site as well as Processing 0115 and version 1.1 of WinVDig from here – note this is not the latest version that you obtain from the WinVDig site.

Digital Geography graph

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 29, 2006
in Asides
. 2 Comments

This is a graphical representation of this site. I posted it directly from Flickr, for no particular reason. The websites as graphs site provides the means (though not necessarily the meaning!)

website as graph
image on Flickr

Leave them kids alone

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 23, 2006
in Asides
. Closed

fingerprint

Leave them kids alone!

More on Quikmaps

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 23, 2006
in Google Maps, Photographs and Teaching resources
. Closed

Thanks to Tom Barrett I’ve been having another look at Quikmaps today.

quikmap

Unfortunately they don’t work with WordPress very well, so I created a page at Juicy Geography to display the results.

Using Picasa 2 to geotag photographs

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 9, 2006
in Google Earth and Photographs
. 1 Comment

I’ve just completed a short illustrated article.

New Google Earth 4 Beta and other bits

Published
by
Noel Jenkins
on July 9, 2006
in Google Earth, Google Maps and Teaching resources
. 2 Comments

I’ve tested the latest version of Google Earth 4 beta and am happy to report that it’s running very happily on my PC and the bugs that I’d experienced previously seem to have been sorted out. Thanks, as usual, to Google Earth blog.

Both history and geography teachers will like an excellent little overlay of Pompei AD79, from Google Earth hacks, especially now that the area is in high resolution. This comes from Ogle Earth – congratulations by the way on your first aniversary!

pompeiclick to enlarge


Finally, Quikmaps offers a way to add lines symbols and scribbles to a Google Map. I’m sure there are plenty of classroom uses, though at the moment my creativity seems to have deserted me! Definitely worth an investigation though. The site is extremely easy to navigate and the resulting maps are easily shared.