Thursday, January 24, 2013

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.  

Friday, January 4, 2013

Google Earth Tours in Education: 19 Best Practices


I'm pleased to say that John Bailey and I have a paper out in "Google Earth and Virtual Visualizations in Education and Research" on 19 best practices on how to design Google Earth tours for education.

The paper isn't free to download but to give you a taster I've taken a table from a draft of the paper  which summarizes the best practices discussed (note GET = Google Earth Tour).  I've discussed many of these best practices on this blog so I've added links to posts within the table (some posts also discuss other topics).


Subject Area
No.MajorMinorBest Practice DescriptionEvidence
1
Producing Process
Iteration and testing
GETs should be generated in an iterative process that incorporates user testing.
Scholarly
2
Student focus
Scholarly
3
GET Slides
Narration, Annotations and Labels
Empirical
4
Empirical
5
Empirical
6
Labels and annotations should be used often but without impacting visual clarity.
Empirical
7
Chart Junk
Empirical
8
Personalization
Within a GET narration should use less formal language
Empirical
9
Using Animations
Scholarly
10
The visual complexity of GETs should be made simpler than comparative   static maps where possible.
Scholarly
11
GET Virtual Flights
Speed of Flight
Speed in flights should be slower with rising complexity on screen and be in the range 0.5 to 8 scales per second.
Scholarly
12
Camera Angles
Empirical
13
Looped Paths and Overviews

Empirical
14
Empirical
15
Acceleration and Deceleration
GET flights between waypoints should accelerate at the start and decelerate at the end.
Scholarly
16
CombinedGET Slides and Virtual Flights
Grids for Navigation and Scale
Scholarly
17
Scholarly
18
Embedding GETs in Earth Science Teaching
Topics that are Effective when presented as GE Tours
The use of a GETs should be particularly considered when illustrating 3D topography, data over a range of scales/locations, and/or introducing a GE map collection.
Logical
19
Creating Activities for GE tours
GETs should be used to support activity-based teaching
Empirical