Category: EdTech

0

Where were you born?

Posted on By Tom No Comments on Where were you born?
EdTech, Geocaching and Maps, Internet

Dear Twitterites, Facebook Friends, Google Plussers, and RandomConnections Readers: I need your help with a project.  This summer I’m doing several workshops for SCETV on Google products, including Google Earth and Google Docs. I’m hoping to include some information on Google Fusion Tables as part of the workshop, and in order to do that I … Read More “Where were you born?” »

More on Elevation Profiles

Posted on By Tom No Comments on More on Elevation Profiles
EdTech, Geocaching and Maps

A couple of posts back I wrote about discovering Elevation Profiles for Paths in Google Earth. I’ve spent a little bit more time working with this, and came up with another neat activity for a classroom.

In the last post I created a path with only two endpoints – basically a straight-line cross section. I also did this across fairly large areas of land, entire states, in fact. This activity focuses in on the details a bit, and uses the directions section of Google Earth.

First, go to the Directions tab and input two locations. These can be addresses, lat-long coordinates, or any other type of locator. For this activity, I suggest keeping the distances fairly short, probably within about 50 miles. Here are some suggestions:

  • From your home to your school, workplace, or church
  • Between two cities
  • Between your house and your best friend’s house

In the example below, I used Greenville and Spartanburg.

Screen shot 2011-04-27 at 6.17.33 AM

When you hit Enter or click on the magnifying glass search icon, you get driving directions between the two cities. For some strange reason Google Earth chose Wade Hampton Boulevard instead of I-85. I guess it went with the shortest route rather than the quickest. No matter – I can still illustrate the point.

Read More “More on Elevation Profiles” »

Elevation Profiles in Google Earth

Posted on By Tom 4 Comments on Elevation Profiles in Google Earth
EdTech, Geocaching and Maps

File this one under “How the heck did I let this one slip past me?” I’ve just discovered Elevation Profiles for Paths in Google Earth. I have no idea when this became a part of Google Earth (years ago?) but I came across this feature as I was plotting my river routes for my Backyard to Ocean post.

For any given path in Google Earth, you can select Elevation Profile and it will display a graph showing the rise and fall of that path from sea level. This works for ANY path, regardless of length or the number of anchor points. For demonstration sake, though, I like to use a path with only two anchor points – a beginning and and end.

Let’s say, for example, that you create a straight line path across the continental United States. You have two anchor points – one on the west coast, and one on the east coast. Your path would look something like this…

US Selection

Once you have saved that path to My Places, you can right click on the path and select Show Elevation Profile from the menu. That would give you a graph like this…

United States

Read More “Elevation Profiles in Google Earth” »

Stereograph Collections

Posted on By Tom 1 Comment on Stereograph Collections
EdTech, History and Genealogy, Photography

stereograph

I think I mentioned that while growing up we had an old stereographic viewer and collection of stereograph cards as seen above. I used to love playing with it, and it seemed like we had quite the collection. While I was still on this 3D kick I decided to check to see if there were other collections online besides the one I found at the University of South Carolina Library. It turns out that there are an AMAZING number of images available online, if you know where to look.

The first thing I did was just a simple Google Image Search for the term “stereograph.” That turned up lots of interesting hits, and some potential sources for more images. It looked like a good many of these led back to the Library of Congress, and that’s where I hit paydirt.

My first search on the Library of Congress’s site led me to the Robert N. Dennis Collection, now housed at the New York Public Library. The stereographic images in the University of South Carolina’s online collection are from this collection. Dennis was not a photographer, but a collector, and he amassed a huge collection of these image cards. Many of these depict life in small-town America, but the collection itself spans the US and includes some European shots. Dennis donated these to the library in two batches, first in the 1930’s and later in the 1950’s. The collection consists of about 72,000 stereograph cards, of which a little over 12,000 have since been digitized and placed online.

The online Dennis Collection can be browsed by state, so I was curious to see what was available for South Carolina in addition to those I had already seen. I was surprised to see that there were several images of Greenville, including one for Reedy Falls and one of the old Furman campus and Belltower.

Reedy FallsFurman

Read More “Stereograph Collections” »

Research Tips with a Camera

Posted on By Tom 6 Comments on Research Tips with a Camera
EdTech, General Technology, Internet

As I was doing the research for my post on South Carolina’s Tricentennial, one point was driven home – you just can’t find everything you need on the Internet. That’s a lesson our students often forget. Sometimes you just have to crack open a book or make a trip to the local library in order to get the information you need.

I have, however, found a couple of tricks to make library research much easier, especially if you’re working with reference materials and other items that have limited circulation, or that can’t be removed from the library. I’ve found these techniques especially helpful in places like the South Carolina Room of the Greenville County Library, where the items are often one of a kind, and need to be protected.

I always have an old-fashioned pencil and paper for taking notes, but my research tool of choice lately has been my trusty Nikon S70 point and shoot camera. Today’s cameras have such high resolution and memory is so cheap that it’s just as easy to snap a picture of a page in a book to review later. You can zoom into the photo to read the text clearly, and it saves a ton of money on photocopying. You can also snap photos of images and illustrations, as well as bibliographical information for proper citation later.

Read More “Research Tips with a Camera” »

Media Literacy and Tasteless Advertising

Posted on By Tom 2 Comments on Media Literacy and Tasteless Advertising
EdTech, Miscellaneous

Back in the 1980s I used to teach a unit on propaganda techniques to my seventh grade students. We would study Edward Filene’s seven techniques of propaganda, then analyze print and television ads to see how these were used. The students would then try to write their own ads using these techniques. Today this would now fall under the standards for Media Literacy, but essentially it was the same thing.

Over the holidays we watched more junk TV than we usually do, and there seemed to be lots of ads for products from the National Collectors’ Mint. This company specializes in private minting of commemorative coins, and their ads are so over the top that they seemed like a perfect candidate for one of these propaganda technique lessons. In particular, I kept seeing ads for this 9-11 commemorative coin…

10th Anniversary September 11th Commemorative Gold Proof Collector

I’ll say up front that I think this is a tasteless scam. It plays upon emotions and tries to get people to invest in something that is relatively worthless. I think that anyone that falls for this is an idiot, and I find it appalling that there are some many of these advertisements on television – TV Spam. That aside, though, let’s take a look at some of the specific techniques this advertisement uses.

Read More “Media Literacy and Tasteless Advertising” »

Distance Learning in Spart Five

Posted on By Tom No Comments on Distance Learning in Spart Five
EdTech

Spartanburg Five Moodle.png by RndConnections on Aviary

I’ve been working on a project at work for several weeks now. The idea actually arose last spring, and I had hoped to have this complete over the summer. What I wanted to do was create a one-stop shop for online learning for our district. This would incorporate Moodle for course management, a way to host online meetings, and a place to store digital media such as video and audio files. I wanted all of this in a nice attractive, easy-to-use interface. Today all of that finally came together, and I brought my online learning community to life.

I had put together a Moodle server several years ago, and we used it for some online courses. Unfortunately, the server that I had it on crashed, and we were left without. The first step was to get this back up and running. I started with a server and set it up with Ubuntu Linux and did a subversion installation of Moodle. However, I really wanted two installations of the system – one for students and one for teachers. Since I’m not really a Linux geek, I couldn’t figure out how to do that through a subversion process. I also planned to use Ostube for video hosting, but it proved to be a challenge to install, too. That killed the summer, and I wasn’t able to get the system online by the start of the school year.

Read More “Distance Learning in Spart Five” »

A Few Google Flaws

Posted on By Tom No Comments on A Few Google Flaws
EdTech, General Technology, Internet

The past several posts I’ve been singing the praises of Google. However, all is not perfect in Google Land. There have been the occasional really bad ideas – Google Wave, for example – and the abandonment of some really good ideas, such as Google Notebook. In this post I’m going to stay away from the more published flaws that Google has had to endure. Instead, I’ll cover just a few things that I’ve found to be a bother.

I’ve already mentioned that until only recently, group accounts could not be used for Google Maps, Picasa, or other many other Google products.  That really limited the effectiveness of those accounts.  Fortunately, that has been corrected.  However, there are still a few things that are not quite right.

Read More “A Few Google Flaws” »