I’ve written up a short investigation on Juicy Geography’s Google Earth blog
Tag Archive for 'mobile-phone'
A virtual globe for your phone..
I’ve just downloaded Wayfinder Earth to my mobile phone. It’s a beta version, mapping application that zooms from a globe overview down to city street level, and links to a GPS to provide a phone-based satellite navigation system.
The globe is nicely rendered and pans smoothly. I was quite impressed. Providing that you have an internet connection, the transition from globe to the maps (provided by Tele Atlas) is seamless and rapid. The maps themselves are hardly beautiful, but are nevertheless functional and detailed. It can be a little disorientating at certain zoom levels with a lcak of named locations with which to get your bearings. The maps are rendered very quickly, especially by phone standards, and they take up very little memory.
If Wayfinder Earth remains free to use, then I’d say it’s an essential mobile application. I noticed that when I tried to link Wayfinder Earth to my GPS it wanted to go to an internet shop and upgrade. At this point you are buying into the existing Wayfinder Navigator sat-nav system. I’ve used Wayfinder Navigator for a while and really like it. It’s has just been improved with a nice visual makeover. As a sat-nav program it’s quite easy to use, has a postcode look up, gives very good directions and clear visual instructions and even warns of some (but not all) speed cameras. The Wayfinder website gives more information, and there’s a generous free trial period. You need a suitable phone and a bluetooth GPS.
What WayFinder Earth is not, is any kind of mobile Google Earth. As a mapping program for your phone, it’s brilliant and will work all over Europe and North America. You will want to buy a GPS and upgrade once you’ve tried it! I don’t know how much it is to purchase and use as a fully featured sat nav program , however I’m guessing it will be the same as Wayfinder Navigator, (99 Euros).
Thanks to Ogle Earth for spotting the release of Wayfinder Earth today
I have added the first of my Yellow Arrows to two locations in North Devon that are important to me. The others will be used in a Geography/Art collaboration
project.
This is the very first arrow:
There are lots of surf shops in North Devon, the arrow is placed on the window of the only shop manufacturing surfboards locally. If you’re in Braunton, text the code on the arrow to the SMS number provided, for a personal message!
This arrow has been placed somewhere on a beach. I’m not saying which beach, or where the arrow is located, but it’s not hard to find!
There’s a message for weekend / London surfers to be discovered.
Tomorrow I will be moblogging directly from a GCSE fieldtrip on Exmoor, (providing there’s an Orange signal!) I will also be testing some handheld GPS units and Phone2GEarth as well. The idea is to use the the phone to locate and photograph the fieldwork sites. The phone images will be geotagged in the evening.
The handheld GPS units will be used in conjunction with a traditional gun clinometer to measure the gradient of the river bed and the valley sides. The results will be available on this site in .gpx format so that they can be viewed in GPS Visualizer. It will be interesting to evaluate the accuracy of the traditional method compared to the modern.
I’ve tried out a little mobile phone application called “Phone 2 Google Earth” The program communicates with a bluetooth GPS and records your position at regular intervals for as long as required. You can also record placemarks. The data is saved as a KML file, which can be transferred from the phone to a PC. Here is an example google earth file .
click to enlargeThe llamas featured as a placemark can be seen on my moblog.
The colour and opacity of the track can be modified once it has been imported to Google Earth via the advanced tab. It would be nice if there was an option to output the data as a GPX file which would preserve other aspects of the GPS log, such as speed and altitude, giving you the choice as to whether to use Google Earth or GPS Visualizer to view the data. As a basic tracking program however, Phone2GEarth works very well, and I’ll use it for fieldwork.
I’m having a break from this blog for a few days while I investigate the potential of moblogging for geography fieldwork.
I have set up a sandbox moblog here, and I’m using a Blogger site to post about my progress. When you think about it, the ability to travel somewhere, take a picture and write a few words, then in seconds, publish on the internet is pretty amazing. Well it is to me anyway!
Last week I spontaneously decided that it would be a good idea to film some students talking about their homework. I recorded the video on my mobile phone and converted the file into .avi format using Xilisoft 3GP video converter.
Subsequently, I’ve felt that this is a really good way of assessing work. Because the students themselves aren’t in the frame (an important point), they focus on describing their homework. Their understanding is evident, and a collection of short videos like these may be a useful tool when demonstating their progess to a sceptical Ofsted inspector.
I got some Year 10 students to talk about the Year 7’s work today and filmed them in the same way. There were two reasons. Firstly I thought it would be an interesting form of assessment for learning, because the Year 7 students would be able to see how other pupils interpreted their work, and consequently how to improve it. Year 10s got the opportunity to revise some of their work on settlement.
I’ve briefly edited the videos in Windows Movie Maker and the results are available to download below:
Year 7 talk about their work (9.4mb wmv)
Year 10 talk about Year 7 work (4.1mb wmv)
The files play in Windows Media Player, and because of the limitations of the recording device, you may need to turn up the sound on your speakers.
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