Juicy Geography’s web log
This excellent little script is working again. Go to FlickrFly site.
Simply add a tiny snippet of code to a description of a geotagged photo in Flickr, and on clicking the newly created link, you fly to that location in Google Earth.
Here is an example of a photograph tagged with Flickr Fly Click “Fly to this location” to see the effect. You need Google Earth installed obviously!
I’m rapidly talking myself into getting a smartphone. Not just for the live GPS tracking (see previous post), but because of concepts like Semapedia. In essence, Semapedia is about tagging real world locations with internet-based information, via a mobile phone. This could be a great (and highly subversive) fieldwork activity. Ogle Earth has posted an interesting article about Semapedia, together with a link to a Google Earth file for viewing some of the recently tagged locations.
I’ve printed out my first Semapedia tags - can you guess where they are going?
update 29/1/06 - I’ve just addded my first Semipedia tagged image to Flickr. The image is also tagged with the Flickr Fly script - see this page for more details
Ricoh have introduced a new camera which is able to add location data to photos as they are taken. This would be brilliant for fieldwork. An idea of the likely cost, and more details about the camera may be found at GeoSpatial Experts
Thanks to Ogle Earth, I discovered that the service provided by 3D Tracking.net will allow live tracking of students on a Google Map.
A child could be outside the classroom conducting a fieldwork experiment, while their location is fed back live to the rest of the group. There could be scope for various kinaesthetic activities based around maps - what is the straightest / quickest / most scenic route between places? for example. I’ve sought advice from the company who tell me that the quickest way into the world of live tracking is via a secondhand mobile phone like the Nokia 6600 from a well-known auction site and a Bluetooth GPS receiver from the same source. Initial calculations suggest that the total outlay could be around £100.00 - £120.00
There was a recent and rather short-lived discussion on the value of mobiles at SLN recently! Maybe this thread could be extended in light of this development.
I’m intent on trying this out, but its been pointed out to me that I need to have some slightly more focussed ideas as to the educational value before committing to a hardware purchase. That’s never stopped me before, and I do need a new phone…
I spent part of today on Braunton Burrows investigating whether a hand-held GPS can take the place of compass, clinometer ranging poles, tape measure and general fieldwork tedium.
I have concluded that the wonderful Magnalox does indeed offer a challenge to the traditional fieldwork method for dune transecting.
View the sand dune transect on Magnalox
There is an option to view the dune transect on a Google Map or in Google Earth. The thumbail is a screenshot of the Magnalox web page.
Thanks to Tom for helping with the fieldwork!
Magnalox is a web-based application that brings a GPS track to life. Simply download and save your track from a GPS and upload it to Magnalox (”magnificent GPS logs and interactive reports”) The application will transform your track into an animated map that reproduces your journey. Elevation data is displayed as an accompanying graph, and the “killer feature” is the option to add notes and pictures from the journey into the finished log. This is a fantastic way to record field trips. I have produced a short magnalog of my local block with photographs. You can also view the magnalog on Google Earth or on a Google Map.
This is the second idea for using a hand-held GPS in a classroom.
Get the students in small groups to draw out a word or phrase on graph paper. They convert the word to vectors, for example North 20m, South 10m, West 10m, South 10m. They can use the GPS to try and follow each other’s co-ordinates and discover the original words as they are revealed on the GPS “bread-crumb” track display. This idea might be a bit fiddly with a GPS without an electronic compass.
A variation on this idea would be to get students to walk around a large open space to create huge virtual words in the GPS tracklog. These can be uploaded into Easy GPS, edited and saved as a GPX file, and from there into Google Earth or Google Maps, via GPS Visualizer
Download Google Earth example file
This idea is still rather conceptual! I need to tie it into some actual learning objectives. Observing your virtual graffiti from space is quite cool though.
Update 30/4/06 I’ve found the GPS Drawing web site, which takes the whole concept further.
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