Perhaps it’s that I’m the son of a school principal, and had run of the various schools that I attended growing up. Perhaps it was the many reunions and covered dish suppers our family attended in various country community centers. Perhaps it was even because I spent college summers working maintenance – painting and waxing all of the schools in our district. It might, in some small part, have something to do with my own long career as an educator. Whatever the reason, I’ve always had a fascination with school architecture. Just about any school can be interesting, but what catches my attention most are the old wooden framed country schools.

Driving through the country these are easy to spot.  The architecture is distinctive.  The buildings tend to be squarish with hipped roofs.  If it’s got an old bell tower, all the better.

Well, OK, they don’t all have to be white frame. There are some cool old brick schools, too.

Recently I was doing some research on the South Carolina State Archives website. There is a marvelous collection of photographs of old schools taken between 1935-1950 for insurance purposes.

Browsing this collection got me thinking about these old schools. They are great subjects for photography, and an excellent symbol of a bygone time. I wanted to see if I could find more of these old schools, and that meant making a list of potential targets using Google Earth. (more…)

One of the reasons I upgraded to an Android phone was my interest in Augmented Reality.  I knew I would be doing some traveling this summer and wanted a way to check out items around me quickly, without having to bring my work Blackberry along.  I got a chance to put the new smartphone through its paces last weekend in Washington DC, and here are some of my initial feelings about AR…

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The folks over at the Google Earth Design blog have been running a series on creating Google Earth tours.  They have had some excellent suggestions for creating effective tours. (Part 1, Part 2).  It was enough to get me to try creating a tour or two.

For some reason I haven’t done much with GE Tours.  To me they seem passive in a constructivist classroom.  If I’m doing a presentation, I prefer to use a series of placemarks that I access as needed, rather than a fixed tour.  In fact, the GE Design Blog states the following:

If changes of scale and location are not important your narrative it is quicker and just as effective to use presentation software such as PowerPoint.

However, their blog posts inspired me to at least give it a shot.  I won’t repeat all of their suggestions, but here are a few things I learned…

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Yesterday I presented readers with a problem – Can you tell the approximate time of day an image was created in Google Earth?   Using the image above of Cherrydale Shopping Center in Greenville, I pointed out some clues and some strategies for making a guess.  Here’s another, sure-fire way of figuring out the problem…

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Here’s an interesting activity you can do with students using Google Earth.  It helps if you use the actual program (or the satellite view in Google Maps) instead of a static image so that students can zoom in and out…

View Larger Map

The above Google Earth image is of the Cherrydale Shopping Center in Greenville.  Using only clues from the image, can you tell me the following:

1. About what time of day was the image captured?
2. What month was the image captured?

Good luck! (more…)