The recent maps of tranquility published by the CPRE are a great resource for teaching about the concept of urban sprawl.
I added a couple of the maps as overlays in Google Earth. By turning transportation layers on and off the effect on tranquility for different types of roads, railways and airports is revealed. It’s interesting to note that motorways are often less disturbing than A roads.
Download overlays for the southwest and London area
The site has some other useful resources such as the “what does tranquility sound like”? noises.
I’ve updated the Diamond Trade Google Earth resource file after the path to the images broke.
The accompanying learning materials can be found at Juicy Geography. This lesson was developed with the support of the photojounalist Kadir Van Lohuizen whose stunning collection of images entitled Diamond Matters is available from Amazon books.
It’s now possible to view the Diamond Trade file in Google Maps, very useful in the classroom if Google Earth isn’t available. (This trick works with many Google Earth files - just paste the path to the .kmz file into the Google Map address bar. Overlays aren’t supported yet.) Click the image below to go to the Diamond Trade Google Map:
Read the original post
Thanks to Google Earth blog for news of this superb animation by GE Community user barnabu, who has applied Timespan tags to his City of London model. The result is a very pleasing animation that could be used in the classroom to at the start of a lesson on change in the CBD. Although the animation requires the latest version of Google Earth, the actual file is quite small and runs very smoothly.
click to enlarge
The original post by barnabu with instructions, and a download link is here.
Microclimate data in Google Earth
I’m very grateful to Tom Biebrach of Pencoed School for sharing his microclimate study that employs Google Earth extremely effectively.
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Tom’s school is portrayed in high resolution, and his local study makes use of a variety of ICT techniques to plot microclimate data. GPS was used to fix positions for the measurements, the data was processed by GPS visualizer into Google Earth placemarks. The placemarks link to videos of the students involved in their fieldwork. The temperature data is charted using GE Graph and finally Tom created simple outlines of the school buildings by drawing polygons over the footprints in the image and then extruding them to appropriate heights (note that this requires Google Earth Plus or Pro.)
This is a brilliant demonstration of digital geography and the original file is available here for download.
Atlas Gloves proved extremely popular at our Open Evening this week as visitors raced to find landmarks such as Big Ben in Google Earth using nothing but a pair of illuminated ping pong balls.
Atlas Gloves is an alternative interface for Google Earth and well worth investigating. See my previous post. It is particularly effective on a whiteboard with the user standing some distance away from the webcam. I’m happy to provide further details of installation if required.
Wikimapia network link
Finally, as previously reported, Wikimapia is the quickest way of adding user generated data to Google Maps - a great idea for a local study and now a network link is available for Google Earth.
Thanks to Google Earth blog for this news!
I’ve put together a really simple Google Earth file containing some placemarks for selected geographical features of the Jurassic coast, a geology map and links to Flickr photos. The file can be played as a tour if desired.
Update:
The file has been slightly improved with a couple more placemarks and photographs. I’m using it to introduce coastal landforms, the idea is that students identify the features labelled with placemarks using the picture clues.
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Download Google Earth file of the Jurassic Coast
There is a new network link for Flickr that pulls in geotagged images available here.
Several people have contacted me recently because network managers are refusing to install Google Earth on the grounds that the license doesn’t specifically mention education and school use.
To clarify the situation; the official Google Earth help centre states that: “The use of Google Earth for educational purposes in primary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions is OK.” link to item
Google Earth Plus is definitely for personal use, though schools can request a copy of the Pro version by contacting Google directly.
Some great new information layers are waiting to be discovered in Google Earth. My favourite so far is the UNEP Atlas of our Changing Environment (under the Featured Content tab.)
Fortuitously, overlays for the 3 Gorges dam have appeared at the exact moment I need to teach the case study to my GCSE group!
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Thanks as usual to Google Earth blog!
Update:
There’s been a couple of upgrades to Google Earth in the past few days. I’ve noticed a big increase in speed and stability with the latest version 4 beta. Download from here.
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