Category: Google

This app won me over straight away. Over a year ago when I started to use GE I could see massive potential in just being able to see the world in an instant. So I set about making some resources and clearly the first things that came to mind are the geographical uses of the programme. I decided to start posting them on the GE Forum under UK Primary Curriculum and people started to look at it.
I produced some Google Earth resources for “Village life in India” which is a Geography QCA unit. Staff at my school used it with great success in Year 5 and it was a simple resource including locations of the school, county, country, continents and the village itself. I also added in an overlay of a more detailed map showing Chembakoli. Simple stuff but it had a great impact on the children and was a great teaching tool.

The resources I produced just stemmed from there really, my only problem… not enough time to produce and develop the ideas I had. But someone was looking – there have been over 12,000 views on my forum since I began.
I think that the most successful resource I have made, has been the BBC Planet Earth work. The TV series was quite amazing and when I found that much of the video content had been made available online via the BBC website I used it to illustrate the whereabouts of the different aspects of nature in GE.

The only disappointing thing is that although there have been many people viewing there has not been any contributions of content from UK teachers.

Today I have explored the use of geotagging photographs, I used some that I had taken on a bike ride I did with Edward to West Bridgford. During the ride I used my Magellan Explorist 100 GPS to make placemarks of where I took the photographs. I thought I would explore the Yuan CC Firefox extension tool to map my photos after loading into Flickr. Basically this extension adds a GMap button to the photo button header in Flickr. Clicking on this opens up a mapping window. But I struggled to accurately map the photos using the Lat Lon data I had. It didn’t seem to want to save my work or placemark information and clicking and dragging the map was inaccurate.

So I moved onto Panoramio, on this site you upload a photograph and then map it. There are no options to add Lat Lon data, all you do is use Google maps window to locate where you took the photo. You mark it by dragging a placemark icon. This was really easy and quick and simple to do. Once complete the photos appear via Google Earth using the Panoramio network link kml. I would like to develop this into an activity for History and Geography – the former could be work on our local history unit and the latter something as simple as matching the photographs of a river system to the map.