Google Earth: 1 Billion Downloads and So Many Uses in the Classroom

ukautumnGoogle Earth was one of the very first pieces of software that I began to create educational resources with. As I put it in one of my first ever blog posts 5 years ago: “This app won me over straight away.” The engaging environment really struck a chord with me and I remember fondly my first forays into using it to support learning.

It has developed so much over the years – I remember using it for a Geotweets lesson, when we had to track down people replying to us on Twitter and find their exact location in Google Earth.

It feels like a true Autumnal day today in England – despite the temperature anomaly we had just recently – which again reminds me of one of the first resources that I thought was truly magical from the Forestry Commission here in the UK. It was a network link in Google Earth that showed the colour of leaves at different sites around the UK and the icons would change colour accordingly. I loved how the information was live and changing constantly.

Nowadays the Forestry Commission has moved the Autumn Leaf colour project to the Google Maps platform which is similar to what I did with Maths Maps in the end.

geI found this old image of Google Earth which was the starting point for Maths Maps years ago – a car park in Las Vegas. The original resource in Google Earth explored the rudimentary 3D shapes layer as well as webcams that could be viewed to count the frequency of cars on Las Vegas highways!

Google Maps in the end added the collaboration that I was seeking, that made it much easier for people to add resources and ideas – and to share amongst a class. Google Earth kmz files were much more complicated to work with. And so I moved the Maths Maps idea across – you can see them all here or use the link at the top of the page.

One of the most fun uses of Google Earth is the Monster Milktruck. I used as a starter to a maths lesson exploring different types of 3D shapes which we spotted as we drove around San Francisco.

Another memorable use of Google Earth and a successful writing project in my class was creating an escape story based on James and Giant Peach (make sure you follow the links to the other 4 posts). I found that so many children found it much easier to write about what they could see as they navigated around our story location in Google Earth. The engaging visual imagery helped them make a start in their story and seeing the progress or journey of our character reinforced the story structure.

Before the Roald Dahl inspired piece, I was using it to plot the course of diary entries we wrote with a Year 6 class as they took on the role of Mina Harker from Dracula who set sail from England to track down her stricken husband Jonathan in the depths of Transylvania. I later used the story maps idea in my session at the Google Teacher Academy in London.

One of the most impressive resources I have seen was the Ancient Rome 3D model that you could download and explore in Google Earth – allowing you to explore the ancient streets and buildings. I recall one morning starting the day by exploring the 3D model of the Collosseum and drawing lots of wows from the class. A stunning resource that brings the ancient city life for students.

I also really enjoyed the 3D Google Earth model of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which was the first time I think I saw the textures being rendered on the shapes – again such a rich resource for helping children better understand the topic. We of course used the models of pyramids well in our lessons on shape properties in maths too!

It is great to hear that Google Earth has been downloaded over 1 billion times – amazing.GoogleEarth1BillionDownloadInfographic 4e8c6d19c9e5c

 

Designed By JESS3 from visual.ly

You can explore all of my archived posts I have written about using Google Earth use in the classroom here. And don’t forget to explore more ideas for using Google Earth in the classroom in the Interesting Ways presentation – as well as the Google Maps version too.

Embedding Google Maps on Your Blog or Website

This is a pretty straight forward process, but it also can have a variety of different outcomes depending on which map you want to display. It is useful to know these options to offer a richer visual experience on your blog or website.

Here is the basic run through:

  1. Navigate to the location on Google Maps that you want to embed elsewhere.
  2. Click on the LINK button above the map.
  3. You can take the second link of HTML to embed in your blog – this is the default size 450 by 350.
  4. Useful to note here that this is iframe code which doesn’t work well in WordPress (or Edublogs for that matter) – so if you have a WordPress blog write your blog post in the Visual editor and when you are ready switch to HTML editor, paste your code and then publish straight away. If you switch back to the Visual editor the code will get stripped out and your map will vanish.

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Customise your map for embedding:

  1. Hitting the Customise and preview embedded map link will give you a bunch of options and allows you to refine exactly what you want embedded.
  2. The map sizes you can choose from are Small, Medium, Large and a Custom option for you to define the exact size.

You in fact have four different choices for the style of map you can use at this point.

Earth = Google Earth (plugin needed)
Ter = Terrain style
Sat = Satellite imagery
Map = Map

For a fifth and sixth option you can combine the Satellite or Earth imagery with the Maps labels, a little rollover on each button.

Here are the examples of the different maps that you can display embedded below, plus an extra bonus. I particularly like the Google Earth choice that provides that functionality to any user, they of course need the GE browser plugin which is available on Flock, IE, Firefox and Chrome.

GOOGLE EARTH


View Larger Map

GOOGLE EARTH and MAP


View Larger Map

TERRAIN


View Larger Map

SATELLITE


View Larger Map

MAP


View Larger Map

SATELLITE and MAP


View Larger Map

STREETVIEW


View Larger Map

To embed Streetview just drag the little Orange pegman to the map and find your preferred Streetview, then just follow the process explained above, easy. You can always alter the view on the Customise page if you need to.

The location of these maps is the Angel of the North. It is worth looking out for these special locations where Streetview goes offroad and follows footpaths to get up close to various monuments or unique locations.

There you go, seven different types of maps to embed in your blog or website – I hope you found this little guide useful.

What Planet Are You From?

We used Voicethread today for some work about planets in our solar system as part of our Superheroes work. Generally we have used it to support speaking and listening prior to a fiction writing task, but it is equally effective in gathering and sharing research and factual information.

Voicethread Planets

The children worked in pairs on a laptop – opened up the Voicethread we had created and used Planet 10 from the Planet Science website as the main source of information. Not only is this a great interactive model of the solar system but it has information about each planet presented in different ways.

Children also gathered information from other information websites tagged with “planets” on our Delicious account. They then added that information in written or voice form to the Voicethread. A simple way to create a pooled information resource which is presented and created in different forms. As I said in my Teachmeet Takeover talk at BETT last Friday, Voicethread allows children to work together in an open way. They can see everyone’s comments and contributions updating in real time – they can tap into the information others find as well as share their own.

Our next step will be to personify the different planets as Superheroes and link the physical features we learn about with some superhero powers or special abilities.

I like to use Google Earth when talking about the rotation of the Earth and the sunlight layer, shown in the image below helps to model this even further. “What happens in between the dark part and the light part?” a question from one of the children was a good discussion starter.

GE sunlight

Another feature of Google Earth, that is often unexplored, is the different things you can view apart from the Earth. These are Sky, Mars and The Moon. Looking closely at The Moon there is an abundant set of information about the various lunar missions, landings and physical features.

Moon in GE

We discussed the size and scale of the craters we could see (we found one that was 115km across!) and also tracked the route the Appollo 15 Rover took on the surface.

Lunar15

High resolution panoramic imagery is also available dotted around these landing sites and is a fascinating glimpse into the lunar landscape.

Rover

It made me think about combining some of the digital storytelling ideas that we have done using Google Earth and use Google Moon or Mars as a science fiction bachdrop. The incredible imagery would certainly be a great starting point for descriptive writing about a setting.

Looking Back

The sun will soon be rising on 2010 and I just wanted to look back at a hugely eventful year for me personally. Here are some of the things that have been memorable.

Last Christmas we spent our holidays in Australia. It was an amazing trip for me and I would dearly love to return to that part of the world, perhaps on a more permanent basis. When we arrived in Sydney our apartment was not going to be open until later in the day. We had landed about 8am and the prospects of entertaining a 2 year old with all of our luggage still in tow was going to be tricky. But to our rescue came Judy O’Connell and Dean Groom, both of whom I had known from our various online networks but had never met before. Judy kindly picked us up from the airport and we went back to her house where we were able to unwind for a little bit. Dean picked us up later and took us on to our apartment in Manly. I am so grateful for that amazing gesture of kindness – it got our trip off to a great start and illustrates the trust that can be developed through online connections.

TMNEL Prezi

The TeachMeet community has had an incredible 2009 and I have been fortunate enough to have been to five events in person. The BETT show TeachMeet began the year and I was just amazed by the scale of things and the huge interest from the commercial sector. In May Stuart Sutherland and I organised and ran the first TeachMeet in the Midlands, hosted by the National College for School Leadership. It was incredible to be part of the full organisation and we are hoping to hold another in 2010. I was delighted to be invited to do a mini-note at TeachMeet North East London and also to organise TeachMeet Channel 4 to bookend their education conference. In September I was able to return to the Scottish Learning Festival and another TeachMeet held in the BBC Scotland building. Along with popping into various Flashmeetings I also attended Dai Barnes and Doug Belshaw’s hugely successful EdTechRoundup TeachMeet which was held online. This added another amazing dimension to this incredible professional development event. With Stuart Ridout, I am currently organising TeachMeet Bett 2010 as well as TeachMeet Takeover – it looks like it should kick off another inspiring year of grass roots professional development.

When you get an invitation from royalty to a conference in another country you can be excused for being a little sceptical. But the inaugural World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) in Qatar was no joke. I was delighted to be included in only 1000 of the invited delegates from all over the world. A handful of edubloggers were invited but not many actually attended. It was a privilege to represent primary school teachers from the UK and be part of the wider discussions. Although the word “innovation” was in the conference name, little was done to “walk the walk” in terms of the communication processes used. That said, I blogged and tweeted my way through the event to encourage remarks and comment from a wider audience. I hope that if there is a 2010 event that more will be done to encourage delegates to share what they experience with a world audience.

This time next year I will have spent a term in a new job! After a bit of grumbling I stumbled upon a Deputy Head Teacher job that I believed would be a great opportunity. I spent the return flight from Qatar writing the letter, which got me an interview. The day and a half interview was a great challenge and I was thrilled to be offered the job. I will be starting as Deputy Head Teacher in the Summer term. I have been in my current post for about 8 years and I have been through some great times, but it has long been time for me to move on and face a new challenge. As part of the interview I asked readers of this blog and followers on Twitter to help with some testimonials. I printed them off and found a moment in the formal interview to hand them out to the panel – it was an amazing set of references and I have no doubt helped secure the job. Thankyou to everyone who contributed to the 20,000 character job reference.
Touching the surface

During 2009 I continued my involvement with multi-touch technology in the classroom. At BETT in January I met with representatives from SMART and organised an early trial of the SMART Table in my classroom. After working with it I felt it’s capacity to impact on learning was limited. Sadly the trial was abruptly ended, in my opinion due to an honest and frank account of my experiences I blogged about. Although critical of the SMART Table I was committed to helping SMART improve and develop it as it would directly benefit the wider multi-touch educational technology field. But, alas, they prevented that by taking it away and they did it, in my opinion, to limit the damage caused by my negative posts. I am now a member of the SynergyNet steering group at Durham University who are developing a multi-touch learning project, and met in November of this year for the first time. The developments at Durham are really exciting: multi-touch classrooms, networked tables able to pass media between them and a general focus on the pedagogies that underpin multi-touch enhanced learning.

This academic year we have been doing shorter half-termly topics in Year 5. We have found that although shorter, they are more focused. The first one was Sealife. Built around and inspired by the Nintendo Wii game Endless Ocean. It was a pleasure to work with the children during the 7 weeks as we explored, discovered and learned together. Using an open ended game to drive a topic was amazing to work with and the children were completely engaged and enjoyed every moment.

Maths Maps has been a long time in the making. Years ago I made some Google Earth resources that used the satellite imagery to structure maths activities. With the development of Google Maps and the ability to now collaborate on a map as if it is a document, such as a Google Document, I have been able to realise what I had always imagined with these resources. Each Maths Map is a maths topic with activities located on real life objects visible in the satellite imagery layer of Google Maps. In total the 3 current maps have been viewed 85,000 times, but more importantly the idea has inspired other teachers to begin using Google Maps to produce engaging content for their learners.

edte.ch

This year I finally made the switch to a self hosted blog. With the nudging of Doug Belshaw I bought some space and installed WordPress, transferred everything from my old blog and have been really happy here in my new home. The most obvious advantage is the personalisation that you can achieve with your own space. There is no limit or other person choosing what you can add or not. You are free to be as creative with your space as you are with what you write. I was pleased to have been nominated by my peers for 6 different Edublog Awards categories this year, thankyou to all those who wrote such kind words in their nomination posts.

I just tweeted about a couple of updates to two different “Interesting Ways” presentations. The IWB resource was started in November 2007 and now there are about 30 different crowd-sourced resources with a huge amount of shared expertise. I prefer not to be too tool-centric, nor do I like the formulaic “100 Awesome things to do with a Cabbage” sort of posts that have littered education blogging recently. In my opinion what sets the Interesting Ways resources apart is that (a) they all begin at zero, they are put out there not as a perfectly formed multiple of 10 lists and (b) they are built by everyone, the crowd, educators explaining and sharing their experiences. They are authored by the community and I feel lucky to be in the position to keep encouraging them along.

A memorable year in lots of different ways and Christmas at home this year has been made really special as my 3 year old son’s excitement has built to a feverish crescendo. I have been able to share in some of that too. I wonder what 2010 will bring? I am looking forward to it already. I wish you all the best for 2010 and hope you continue to join me.

Shapes in Paris – NEW Maths Map

Hot on the heals of Measures in Madrid here is the next addition to the Maths Maps series. Shapes in Paris makes the most of this beautiful city and the maths that is visible in Google Maps.

SHAPE IN PARIS

View 24 Shape Activities in Paris in a larger map

I have had a lot of fun exploring the city from above! One facet of Google Maps is Streetview which gives us a wonderful 1st person view of the city streets. I used this same view to set some questions about what could be seen.

For example, here is a Police car and on the bonnet is the mirrored word Police written in block letters. Some of the letters are great examples of regular and irregular shapes.

Streetview Shape Questions

From space we have zoomed right down into some lettering which can only be about a metre across! This is the sort of detail that Streetview offers us and our students and I would love to see more Maths Maps questions using Streetview.

In the last few days I have heard from a few teachers in my Twitter network who have used the Maths Maps idea already with their classes and it is thrilling to here it making a difference in other classrooms.

That is the very reason why I share my ideas here.