The video of Digital Explorer’s ‘Virtual Fieldwork Using Google Earth’ course is now on YouTube. Thank you to everyone who made the recent teacher training UK Roadshow possible: Kate Hammond and Ed Parsons at Google, Shane Winser and Lucy Bruzzone at the Royal Geographical Society, Will Evans at Just So Films and Marjan Shirzad here at Digital Explorer.
Archive for the 'google earth' Category
Just received a very nice note from the Geographical Association. I ran two sessions at their conference at the end of March and managed to pack in 55 geography teachers. We managed to make good progress especially given I had condensed the normal 6-7 hour course into 2 hours.
Anyway, they had some very nice things to say…
Excellent and inspiring new ideas
I have never realised the full potential of Google Earth as I have never had the time to sit and mess around with the computer for long enough. An excellent session with an excellent handbook to take back to school.
Great way to develop fieldwork in a very pupil friendly way. Have already used it in my teaching as a way of promoting appreciation of fieldwork.
Can be put in to use immediately - hopefully with out too much cash outlay!
Excellent tutor - good practical ways to use Google earth.
Well delivered, fast pace, interesting and appropriate skills being implanted
Thank you to Lucy at the GA for organising ever thing and if you would like to find out more about what happened at this year’s conference see the Geographical Association website.
Not available yet in UK - will bring you news of any updates and sorry to get your hopes up
To receive a Google Earth Pro license for your school, please email the Google Earth Education Coordinator with the following information:
- the email address that you will use to logon (your existing one or a new one for this purpose)
- a description of your school and a link to the school website
- your name and contact details (address, phone, email, etc.)
- your intended use of Google Earth Pro (what year, subject, project, etc.)
Things are changing so fast with Google Earth, it is often hard to keep up with new features, content, layers and imagery. Google Earth publish a monthly newsletter, The Sightseer - sign up here.
I was asked this question by a teacher who had come on a Digital Explorer Google Earth course:
Sorry to trouble you with this simple question, but I had your details, having come to one of your Google Earth training days in the summer. Having used Google Earth more since then, it is clear that having an upgraded use via Google Earth Plus would be excellent, but I am not sure whether the average price ($20 pa) is per computer, or establishment. The school is obviously happy to pay out the odd tenner, but not much more!
Do you know, please?
I thought that my reply may be useful to other teachers looking at the same issue.
The license price is per logon account/computer, not per establishment. Google have not yet decided to develop an educational pricing scheme for Google Earth. In reality you can use the same logon for two computers. The one extra function that is useful with Google Earth Plus is the GPS data handling. I imagine that you would only be using GPS with KS4/KS5 and I am not sure how many units you have.
My advice would be:
- Ask your IT technicians to set up additional use accounts for pupils using GPS units - e.g. gps1 to gps6 or however many units you have
- Label the machines that you have in the nearest computer room to your KS4/5 geography teaching rooms with these user accounts
- Purchase half as many Google Earth Plus licenses as you have GPS units
- Upgrade Google Earth to Google Earth Plus on the GPS machines, using your new gps1, etc. login details (you can use the same Google Earth Plus account details for two machines)
This way you will have computing capacity to match your GPS units.
More information about how to upgrade to Google Earth Plus and its benefits
Do comment on this post, if you have any other queries or have another solution.
Great for all those heading south. Your progress can now be followed on Google Earth with newly updated satellite imagery. The imagery stops at about 82.5 degrees South as there is no satellite imagery available this close to the pole.
Find out more about the update at the Google LatLong blog.
There is a call for as much user generated content (images, video, etc.) as possible to be added to this newly enhanced area. So, get going and if you need any help then let us know.
Have a look at Digital Explorer’s work for Wilderness Expertise, a youth expedition company, designing a series of Virtual Expeditions with Google Earth.
It’s great to see the Digital Explorer methodology slowly branching out into the mainstream.
The Guardian wrote a great article about some of the ideas coming out of the recent Pop!Tech conference in Maine last month - mapping emotions and wonderfully beautiful and shocking digital images detail the effluent of rampant consumerism.
Chris Jordan’s images combine massive digital photographs (up to 26 x 43 feet) with statistics about the amount of waste produced in the United States. To be faced by an image of 170,000 life-size batteries would certainly bring the point home. Above is one of Chris’ images of Mobile Phones in Atlanta, visit his website to see more of his work.
I was very interested to read about Christian Nold’s work on mapping emotions using Google Earth and a devices to measure adrenaline levels. As Christian points out, with more and more of the world’s population living in cities, it is important to look at more imaginative ways that demonstrate how humans react to the urban environment.
To read the full text of the article, visit The Guardian.
The first in a series of 10 UK workshops supported by Google took place on Monday 12 November in Swansea. Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop was joined by 12 educators from South Wales to learn how to create virtual fieldwork using Google Earth.
It was great to be on the road and bringing this kind of training to educators who cannot get up to the courses in London. Duncan Hawley (Geography PGCE tutor at the Swansea Institute of Higher Education) was our host for the day, and made the excellent point of developing a deeper pedagogy for the work. Based on his feedback, we will look to develop a deeper range of links and resources on Digital Explorer’s Google Earth pages and host an online forum where educators from all over the UK will be able to discuss how they are applying the methodology in their classrooms and in the field.
For details on future roadshow courses visit the Royal Geographical Society website.
The courses are supported by Google and run in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). Digital Explorer has received generous sponsorship from Garmin and Olympus in providing equipment.
I have just developed some resources which may be of use to others teaching Antarctica in Key Stage 3 geography.
The first is on the Antarctic Food Web. I used it by putting a class in an IT room asking them to find information about all the animals that lived in the seas around Antarctica and making notes in their books. We then reviewed the activity by using the flash-based food web on the Royal Geographical Society’s excellent Discovering Antarctica site.
Here’s the Antarctica Food Web kmz file for Google Earth.
And here are a series of graphs that I prepared using the excellent GE Graph programme:
- Rainfall by month in Antarctica (kmz file)
- Rainfall by month in London (kmz file)
- Temperature by month in Antarctica (kmz file)
- Temperature by month in London (kmz file)
I used these files just as presentational tools from the front of the classroom to show the difference between the climate in Antarctica and London. Because I taught these lessons last week, I used the rainfall and temperature in London in October as a benchmark.
Please let me know if you find these useful.
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