Geocaching and Maps – Page 8 – Random Connections

From Flickr to Panoramio

February 16, 2011 Tom 10 Comments

I finally caved in. I’ve been uploading some selected photographs to Panoramio so that they will appear in the Google Earth Photos layer. As of this writing I have 121 photographs that have been selected to appear in Google Earth, and I’ve submitted more that are awaiting approval.

If you’ve got a Google account, then you can use that to sign into Panoramio and create an account. Photos are uploaded just like they are to any other photo sharing site. Just make sure that your photos are geotagged. Even if they haven’t been geotagged previously, there is a drag-n-drop map so you can locate your photos once they have been uploaded.

Panoramio has some specific guidelines for approval for Google Earth. There are the usual conditions – no pornography, discriminative, or abusive photos. However, there are some other guidelines. They are looking for photos that illustrate a place, so images of people, events, or detailed images of flowers or other items may not be approved. Likewise, interior shots probably won’t be selected for Google Earth.

For Google Earth and Google Maps we select only photos about exterior places: landscapes, monuments, streets, buildings, parks, and so on. All photos must comply with the Panoramio Photo Acceptance Policy.

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Geopackrat Reborn

October 3, 2010 Tom No Comments

EdTech, Geocaching and Maps, Internet

This is another in the ongoing series of Google experiments I’ve been doing over the past several weeks… If I were starting out on this RandomConnections venture now instead of several years ago, I might be doing things very differently. Given the number of resources available on Google, I’m not sure I would have bothered … Read More “Geopackrat Reborn” »

Using Surveys in Google Earth

September 14, 2010 Tom No Comments

EdTech, Geocaching and Maps

This week I’m doing a workshop for our teachers on creating virtual tours in Google Earth. This part of a graduate course dealing with Google Apps, and I was trying to find ways of using Google Docs to create the tours. In the process I came across a neat way of using surveys in Google Earth.

This process is similar to one of the collaborative activities I described in a previous blog post. The process is similar to the one I described there, but instead of having students create PowerPoint presentations and upload them to Google Docs, the teacher creates forms with which the students interact.

The following is from the handout that I created for the workshop…

Old School Charm

July 18, 2010 Tom 9 Comments

Geocaching and Maps, History and Genealogy, Local

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.

Augmented Reality

June 11, 2010 Tom No Comments

Gear, General Technology, Geocaching and Maps, Internet

Iron Man HUD

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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Creating Effective Google Earth Tours

May 26, 2010 Tom 3 Comments

Geocaching and Maps, Internet

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…

Telling Time in Google Earth, Part 2

May 6, 2010 Tom 1 Comment

Geocaching and Maps, Science

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…

Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?

May 5, 2010 Tom 2 Comments

EdTech, Geocaching and Maps

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:

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

Good luck!

Google Earth Meets Google Maps

April 28, 2010 Tom No Comments

Geocaching and Maps

Google Earth is now accessible through a browser via the Google Maps page. The plug-in for Google Earth has been available for quite some time now, so this is only a natural progression. On the Maps page there is now an “Earth” view in addition to Map and Satellite. Terrain has been relegated to the … Read More “Google Earth Meets Google Maps” »

Adding Google Earth to PowerPoint – Another Method

April 26, 2010 Tom 3 Comments

Geocaching and Maps

I recently received a request for help from one of my readers regarding Google Earth and PowerPoint. The reader wanted to know how to put a Google Earth tour into PowerPoint. This website gets lots of hits from folks wanting to learn how to embed Google Earth into their presentations, but Google hasn’t made it easy. Therefore, I’ve put together a tutorial for one method, but first it might be helpful to clear up a few things.

Google Earth Tours – Yes, you can create and save tours. However, the files that are created are KMZ files that can only be opened in Google Earth. These are NOT video files, and they cannot be easily imported into another program.
Embedding Google Earth – Right now there is no good way to get Google Earth to play in a PowerPoint slide. You could create a link on your slide that opens a KMZ file outside of PowerPoint in Google Earth itself. You could also embed a web page that has the Google Earth plug-in for web enabled, but that get’s to be more complicated than it’s worth.

I’ve already demonstrated how it’s possible to add PowerPoint slides to Google Earth. However, I still get inquiries for the other way around – adding Google Earth to PowerPoint, even though the two points above make it difficult, if not impossible. Well, there are a couple of ways, but they’re not perfect. The first involves just exporting static images from Google Earth and putting those images into your slides. The other involves video screen capture. Here’s how it’s done…