Following a post on my Google Earth blog, I reflected that it would be fun to give students named geographical features and get them to find a representative image which they process using the method described by the Artwork Earth post by S. Fjalar
I put togther a quick example gallery, using the first four terms that came to mind:
I made the above images very quickly using the first four words that sprang to mind. The exercise I envisage is more explicitly geographical than the Artwork Earth images. Elusive images (such as the barchan dune) could be given to students with better spatial understanding, therefore differentiating the exercise. The results could make a really good display, or used as a visual glossary of key terms.
I’ve been experimenting with mapping data inside Google Earth. The latest version of the excellent GE Graph includes the ability to add data to polygons. Here is an example:
This Web 2.0 advent calendar offers an interesting collection of recent web-based tools, all of which look useful to teachers, with some familiar and unfamiliar applications that I look forward to exploring further.
Doug Belshaw mentionedSplashr a while back, but I’ve only just had a look. It’s a very convenient tool for displaying Flickr images and while there are lots of different styles, I made this as an example of how it could be used on an interactive whiteboard in a “guess the location” context.
Brilliant video from Eric Prydz, sampling Pink Floyd with great sequences of free-running and other street sports. And then there’s the message! Via Tony Cassidy.
Downloading from You Tube
Like most teachers, I have to contend with the filtering of You Tube at work. The solution is fairly simple, just follow the download link at the top of the You Tube page to get the video, and rename the downloaded file with a .flv extension. Next, get the free FLV Player from here and be grateful to Martijn de Visser for this great little application (which you obviously need to install secretly in school!)
Update 6/12/06
The Proper Education video has sadly disappeared from YouTube.
Tony Cassidy offers a video tutorial on Riva Encoder, a free application that allows you to convert You Tube flash video into other formats. The advantage is obvious, as pointed out by Ollie Bray - there’s no need for additional software installation at school.
I was fascinated by the ultra-high resolution landscape images produced by XRez and described in a post on Digital Urban today. The photographs are produced from hundreds of stitched together, overlapping images, and the Google Maps interface is employed to navigate around the image.
Several of the pictures would be very useful in the classroom and could make a really interesting exercise based on observation and reasoning skills - for example you could take a screen shot of a detail of part of an image under high magnification, then challenge students to find it, starting from the zoomed out version.
Photo: 
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