Month: February 2008

This afternoon we embarked upon the most challenging technology related work we have done to date in Year 5. The children are 4th graders, 9 or 10 years old.
Recently we all went to Perlethorpe Activity Centre to support our work on rivers – we measured the velocity and profile of the River Meden, as well as enjoying a lovely sunny walk around the grounds of Thoresby Hall. As we walked round I snapped away some pictures and this afternoon we had the opportunity to geotag them in Google Earth(GE).

The children have used GE many times already this year, so I decided to take advantage of this knowledge as opposed to using Google Maps or Quikmaps as I have done in the past. The geotagging work ties nicely into their ongoing map skills development and is a good conclusion to the visit.

This video clip is one of the children completing the process of embedding an image from Flickr into a GE placemark, using the correct written code. (<img src=””>)It certainly was a challenge for the children but once they had written the code a number of times, and often corrected their mistakes, they were flying.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-5612066013521995380" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

Here is what you have seen Kyle do in a step by step guide.

1. Find an image stored somewhere online, study it carefully and try to pick up on any clues as to where it is. Remember when you geotag an image it should really be located where the photographer was standing when it was taken, not the subject of the image.
2. Copy the location or url of the image – in Firefox you can just right click and “Copy Image Location”. IE take the URL from “Properties”
3. Now navigate back to your new placemark in GE. Make sure you are looking at the properties window – you will add the code in the “description” part.
4. If you just paste the address it will not display the image because you have not told the map to retrieve anything, it will just return a link. You need to add in a little code.
5. All you need to do is ensure the image URL is encoded with the highlighted parts in the example below.
6. <img src=”alovelypicture.online.234.jpg“>
7. Now click OK. If you click on the placemark it should open up with the image inside.
8. When embedding video or other media – just look for the “Blog This” option, and paste the generated code straight into the placemark balloon. Google video can be added pretty easily in this way.

The visual / spatial skills needed to correctly place an image on a map is an interesting one to explore. The children were looking very closely at what clues the image revealed as to the exact whereabouts of it.

I told the children that they would have had a successful afternoon if they could embed just one image in a placemark at the correct location. But, just as they often do, the children ran with it and tagged many pictures correctly on the map. A challenging but ultimately successful afternoon of GE mapping work.

(I will add a link to some example KMZ work as well as a Google Map of our work from today when I can.)