SketchUp has seen a number of important changes since being acquired by Google. Rather excitingly, model buildings can be downloaded from 3D warehouse to save the efort of creating one’s own. The model can then be located in Google Earth as part of an urban studies assignment. For example, where in London would students choose to place this football stadium?
Model by Matty GTFC download from 3D Warehouse
Simply download the model from 3D warehouse and open in SketchUp. Start Google Earth and zoom in to the desired location for the model. Return to the SketchUp window and click the Get Current View button.
The model can then be exported to the desired location using the Place Model button
Return to Google Earth to see the model. Depending on whether terrain is turned on or off, the model could be floating in space or buried deep underground. To fix this, simply right click on the model entry in the Places tab and select Properties to open the Edit Model dialogue. Click on the altitude tab and adjust the slider to place the model correctly.
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The whole procedure is remarkably straightforward, yet the learning task could be quite complex, leading to discussion of the environmental social and economic consequences of the decison.
Thanks to The Map Room for news of Flickrs’ latest development. Photos can now be tagged with their location directly within Flickr. Helpful videos and a fairly intuitive drag and drop interface make the process fairly simple. Unfortunately for UK users, the service is based on Yahoo maps, and they don’t cover the UK at the required scale for accurate geotagging. Here for example are photos that I’d previously geotagged. Pretty useless really.
In the meantime, Yuan.CC Maps or ITag probably represent the best free of charge alternatives for geotagging Flickr pictures in the UK.
Thanks to Geography 2.0: Virtual Globes for news that excellent online spreadsheet EditGrid now has an official add-on that supports the creation of KML for spreadsheet data. This means that spreadsheet data can be displayed on a Google Map or Google Earth.
Online spreadsheets lend themselves to all sorts of collaborative projects, whether sharing weather data, fieldwork measurements or any other kind of spatially located information. EditGrid is very student-friendly and intuitive to work with, as the following demonstration shows.
I have created a open spreadsheet which is dynamically illustrated below (i.e it will update when the data set is edited.)
Online Spreadsheet by user/juicygeography.
Feel free to edit and contribute to the spreadsheet, click the “done” button and observe the changes in the map below. I would be interested in ideas for potential projects. Note that the spreadsheet requires longitude and latitude in decimal format. Here is an online converter. Many online maps, such as Multimap will output coordinates as decimal degrees to save the hassle.
The spreadsheet can also be seen in Google Earth.
Click here for the file.
Note that you’ll need to refresh the network link once loaded in Google Earth in order to see any changes to the spreadsheet. (Right-click on the folder and choose ‘refresh’)
I wonder how long it will be before Google Spreadsheets adds similar functionality? There are other free online spreadsheets, for example IRows which offers a chart function. EditGrid remains my favourite for several reasons. It’s very easy to use, there are several options for exporting the data and publishing to web pages. Judging by the EditGrid blog there’s lots more features to come soon, including charts (yay!) EditGrid is open source, free to use and a triumph for the developers.
Apparently if I install Windows Live Writer (which I’ve just done), and configure it to post to my WordPress blog (yup) I should be able to add Live Local maps as part of the post.
OK so here goes the first attempt. There should be a map of my favourite fishing spot appearing below:
Right, I’m clicking Publish now - can’t wait to see how badly mangled my WordPress page is…
Update (moments later…)
Gosh it’s worked really well. Clicking the image above takes you to the actual Live Local map. My customized WordPress theme seems to have remained intact, however I notice that the page no longer validates. For some reason this has always been quite important to me, however I’ll leave the offending code in for now.
I like this feature. Several colleagues have started geography classroom blogs, my favourite being Val Vannets’ production Geography: My Place and Yours I can see Live Writer being used a lot for this kind of teacher blog.
Thanks to Doug Belshaw’s microblog for the heads-up.
With the release of version 4 of Google Earth my mouse mats (see previous post) required upgrading. I’ve created a couple more visual guides for the latest version. They are a little simpler; I’ve focussed on the main functions that I need my own students to be able to accomplish quickly. These include searching for places, basic navigation, turning placemarks and layers on and off and playing tours. I also need them to be able to create and describe placemarks, vital for some of the Google Earth lessons that I’ve written.
As before, the visual guides are in Word format, the idea is to print them off and laminate them back to back.
Guide to simple navigation:
Click the image to open in Word
Guide to creating a placemark:
Click the image to open in Word
Update 21/8/06
Hello readers of Google Earth Blog!
My Google Earth page for teachers is located here at Juicy Geography.
Lessons, classroom tips, downloads and other stuff.
A download button has appeared on a redesigned site for Arc GIS Explorer!
More images here.
GIS for everyone is promised, and it looks as though I’ll have to get some shapefiles together in preparation for this long awaited application. October / November is the revised timeframe for release.
Presumably almost all of the datasets will be USA-specific, so maybe it’s not worth getting too excited. However there is support for .KML files. I wonder whether ESRI are planning an education pack for school users?
Whoops - I forgot to include this bit … via James Fee GIS Blog Sorry James!
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