Google Earth for Teachers miniMOOC

Screenshot from one of the tutorial videos

Last year we invited a group of geography school teachers into the school of Geography and the environment at Southampton and asked what we, as local university, could do to help them.  The most popular request was 'train us to teach GIS'.  So today I am pleased to announce the launch of

GEFT (Google Earth for Teachers)  

a miniMOOC designed to help teachers use Google Earth to teach GIS in schools.  It's still in Beta (i.e. I'm going to continue improving it) so feedback would be very welcome.

A miniMOOC?  I realise that a mini massive open online course is a bit of an oxymoron but it captures the important characteristics of the course:

• There is no organised start date, you just access the materials as and when.  I may organise course presentations in the future.
• Its the online equivalent of a half INSET day I've been running for several years

Been Here Before:  When Google Earth first appeared in 2005 I recognised that it had fantastic potential as a teaching tool.  I also thought that video was a powerful medium for teaching software and so in 2006 I launched Kokae which was an early kind of xMOOC teaching anyone how to use Google Earth to make maps.  

Turns out I was more or less right about Google Earth (it is the most common GIS in schools, but less commonly used in Universities) and really right about video as 2006 was also the year Khan Academy started.  However, unlike Khan academy Kokae didn't take off so I abandoned it for other experiments in open learning (videos in Google Earth, text based materials).  Now I'm back to a similar format to Kokae once more.

One on One Google Earth training offer for Teachers

Interested in learning how to use Google Earth and a Geography school teacher?  I'd like to test some materials I've produced so if you'd like some one on one tutoring and you:

• Are prepared to meet me in Finchley, London or Highfield campus, Southampton University, Southampton in the next 2 weeks
• Are not a whizz at GIS
• But are capable of doing basic computer tasks (look for things with Google maps, manage files on a hard drive)

I can offer the equivalent of 90 minutes training for free.  First come, first served, email me at rwt at soton dot ac dot uk.

Powers of 10 Centered on Your House

Screen shot showing blue squares generated by the new service around Shackleton's hut in Antarctica

The Powers of 10 film has inspired a recent post here (Understanding of Scale) and an old experiment but today I can reveal I've finally achieved an idea I had 2.5 years ago.  The squares from Powers of 10 film centered wherever you want:  

 Blue Squares Generator

Enter your Lat/Long or let it guess your location and it will generate a Google Earth file (KML) which produces the 1m, 10m, 100m...  ....100,00km blue squares from the film centered on your location.  

Warning:  we haven't got the tour working yet so you'll have to manually zoom out yourself.

It has been programmed by my friend Michael as an exercise in php and web programming.  He has done an excellent job working out the complexities of squares tangential to the earth's surface.  

What you can do with it:  Educationally I think this will be an interesting tool for a number of teaching situations:

• Understanding Scale:  As I discussed the other week the film is excellent at getting school students to think about scale.  If they can see their own neighborhood at the lower scales I imagine it will be even more effective.
• Curvature of the Earth:  The larger squares illustrate the curvature of the earth as you zoom out more.  This one takes some skill at navigating to use.
• What's in my Backyard?:  Often in teaching we need students to understand what is close to a location we are discussing.  Shackleton's Hut in Antarctica (Lat:-77.552923°, Long: 166.168368°) is an example, a small hut surrounded by nothing for miles and miles and miles (choose 3D buildings from the layers panel to show).  To illustrate the space and give a sense of scale, generate the squares and comment on the emptiness as you zoom in or out.  For extra cleverness, generate squares for the hut and a student's house and have them both open in the places column at the same time.  You can then compare and contrast what is in the vicinity of the hut and a student's house in an urban area.  I've made an example tour taking you around: 

 Shackleton's hut to Finchley Street tour

Download the file and double click the tour to play a flight between the hut and the street.  The idea is to pause the tour at various locations and explore the landscape at that scale before continuing.

HEA/Google 'Maps in the Cloud' event

I'm part of the team organizing this event:

NEW! 24 May 2013 - Maps in the Cloud workshop, Google offices, London.

£50 per delegate

A workshop on using free (or really cheap) software for mapping for those involved in GEES teaching. Come to this workshop to find out about the latest technology available to allow you to map using data from the cloud. Presentations will include the latest Google Earth Engine and Maps Engine software, Edina’s new app ‘Fieldtrip GB’, Google tools for Citizen Science, Google Earth’s Time animation, Scale and Tour features as well as the opportunity to become part of an ongoing community.

Bookings will open soon, please register your interest by emailing: Helen.walkington@heacademy.ac.uk

I'll be talking about Google Earth tours.

Understanding scale with Pan and Zoom

Scale has been identified by the American Association of Science (1993) as a cross cutting concept uniting many science areas.  this appears to be borne out by an investigation of experts, the authors found that experts from a huge variety of subject areas all identified understanding scale as key to their topic (eg architects, biologists, cosmologists, physicists ...).
Meanwhile an investigation was done of the educational film 'Powers of Ten'.


 I posted a Google Earth version a while back.  The film has been used a great deal by science school teachers in the States to teach students about scale and the investigation tested its effectiveness in doing this.  Several important points came out of their work:

• Students 11-14 years old when asked to think of the largest thing they could imagine came up with ideas like football pitch and street.
• Students are good at comparing scales (which is bigger?) but poor at imaging absolute scale (wildly out when asked how many miles the United States is across).
• Their performance at understanding scale improved after watching the film.

My thoughts about this are that one of the unsung benefits of using Google Earth in education is its ability to convey scale easily via the power of zoom.  The Powers of Ten film effectively consists of a slow zoom out from human scale to the size of intergalactic space.  This communicates scale via the use of comparative scale - you can see the 10m square disappearing into the centre the centre of the screen as we zoom past the bigger 100m.  
However using Google Earth zoom to convey scale effectively assumes that we:

• Anchor Points: Provide 'anchor points' for users so they can compare sizes on screen e.g. A grid or set of squares (as in the Powers of 10 film) or showing the area of ice disappearing in the Antartic?  Then show an outline of the country of Wales (or similar) familiar to your users to give a sense of scale. [More on Wales as a unit area cliche]
• Zoom Speed: If you zoom out or in too fast user's will have trouble following the scales visible.  In the Power's of 10 film they fly at a gentle 1 change of magnitude per 10 seconds, you can go faster than this without confusing user's but it depends on the complexity of what is in view.

Google maps canned Streetview

One neat trick with streetview is that you can find a view you like and record it as a URL. This can then be entered into a point pop up.  See two points on part of the walk I did last weekend as an example, it worked nicely on a smart phone too.


View Walk example in a larger map

Teaching applications:
- Field Trip: Define points to be visited on a field trip or way points (eg at this sign by the road, turn left).  These can be visited virtually pre and/or post field trip AND used during the field trip using a smart phone* (see walk example above for how this could work)
- Before and after:  link to current photos of a landscape that has changed (the 'after') and the streetview that acts as the 'before' shot.  Here's an example: people took pictures during the flooding of New York by hurricane Sandy which are compared to the streetview shots.
- Different Landscapes: mark views of different landscapes such as mountains (example around Snowdon), farmland and woodland.  Discuss with students how these are modified by man.

HowTo

1. Open Google Maps (you need to be logged into a Google Account: How to create one) and click 'My Places (top leftish) > create a map (red button).
2. Create a placemark on this new map by clicking paddle icon (top left) and then clicking on screen somewhere on a UK road you want to capture a streetview view.
3. Open a new browser tab with google maps in (maps.google.com) 
4. In this new window, drag and drop orange man by Navigation controls (top left) to the location of your placemark .  You will enter streetview.
5. Navigate around in streetview until you are happy with the view. Click the chain icon ( top left/centre) to create a URL, click 'short URL'.  Copy the string created.
6. Now return to your first map and in the pop up window type 'street view at this location' or some more logical text. Click 'rich text editor' and block your typed text. Click on the link icon and paste your URL in. Click ok.
7. Repeat steps 2 to 6 for as many placemarks as you want.  Add lines or areas too if needs be.
8. Select privacy settings as needed, public means anyone can search for and find your map.  Unlisted means only those with the link can find it but obviously, its not properly private.
9. When you're done save your map then click 'Done'.  You will go to the home page of the map you've just created.  Click the link button top left, this now links to your new map rather than the view. 
10. Share the URL with anyone you want to see the map.

*this assumes a decent 3G signal or preloading of data

Google Earth in Award Winning Course

Screen shot of the Frozen Planet interactive map (Google Earth) showing permafrost layer

On Tuesday I went to a talk by Mark Brandon of the Open University (OU) about how they produced courses linked to the BBC ‘Frozen Planet’ TV series which was a joint OU/BBC production.  He had some great stories about what it was like to be involved with fiiming with the BBC at the poles with David Attenborough.

He described two courses:

• A free online course (think MOOC if you don’t recognise the acronym, don’t worry) on the OpenLearn site (link from here but broken at present)
• A short course

These are courses the OU produced, both of which he was involved in.  They were very sucessful in terms of student numbers breaking OU records and Mark explained how students completed tasks in Google Earth (API) as part of their assessments and also how it was used as a content platform. I was pleased to hear that for his work on the courses he won the ‘innovative teacher of the year’ award from the Times Higher.

Talking to him afterwards we agreed that the only real barrier to use by more university teachers was that they didn’t know about its capabilities, rather than it being too complex to use.