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
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.
This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll try to show how it is possible to make use of a hand-held GPS in the classroom.
In order to follow the example, you’ll need a hand-held GPS. I use a Garmin, mainly because of the outstanding compatibility across various software packages. In addition, the freeware GPS data manager GPS Utility or Easy GPS is required.
Scenario: Kids have been out with a hand-held GPS marking the location of traditional signposts for a simple mapping project. The method is starightforward, at each signpost discovery, simply record a waypoint in the GPS. Connect the unit up to a computer and download the waypoints to a GPS data manager such as Easy GPS and save them as a .GPX file. (The waypoints can equally be saved as a .KML file for viewing in Google Earth)
Now visit GPS Visualizer and upload your .GPX file into the Google Maps form. Then prepare to be very happy as your waypoints appear on the map! Here is an example using actual data:
Click to enlarge:
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