Flipped Learning by Animated Poster

So there is a celebration going on in the School of Geography and Environment at Southampton today as we have been teaching geography for 100 years.  As part of that we prepared posters of recent research, mine was about flipped learning (good curation of relevant literature I recently found).  It took me 2 days to prepare the poster so I'd like the audience to be wider than just the visitors to the school today so I've produced a little experiment:

Poster based in Prezi (zoom and pannable)

Youtube Clip Talk zooming and panning around



Educational Value:  I did this by:
1] pasting a series of images of the poster into Prezi
2] Setting up a series of views around the poster
3] adding animated annotations to the views
4] Recording a screencast using screenflow (but the free screencast-o-matic is robust for simple use such as this)
5] uploading to Youtube

The nice thing would be to get students to do a poster then do a talk like this and attach a QR code to the poster linking to the talk so you could scan the QR code (generator page), access the youtube clip and get the author to talk you through the poster as you stood in front of it.  It has a lot in common with a Google Earth tour, instead of a tour around real space you're flying around 'information space'.

Suggested Improvements:  It works as a concept but I didn't design with a phone screen in mind enough IMHO, text needs to be bigger.  Also, it might be nice to extend out the poster to other related media rather than just talk about the poster itself.

Image in balloon pop-up work around

I had multiple students have issues with images in pop-ups not appearing in an assignment this summer.  If you've noticed the same issue on v7 then I have a work around:  upload the image to dropbox and give your image a web link.  Weirdly you can't use Google Drive for this (AFAIK).  As a work around it has the disadvantage that images will load up more slowly than if they were in the KMZ but at least it works.  Here's the specific steps that you can give students:


1] In the Layers column of the bottom left of the Google Earth screen, untick everything (except terrain if you can see it). Delete any features from the last tutorial in the Places column.

2] The image to the left is a photo at this URL https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/504587/A2S/Portree_on_Skye.jpg Save it somewhere sensible. right click the photo > save as

3] Set up a dropbox Account if you haven’t got one, http://www.dropbox.com/login 

4] Access your Dropbox file store via the web https://www.dropbox.com/home/ enter the ‘public’ folder in the list. Anything put in here is available on the web. Now click the upload icon . Its at the top of the screen. Choose the Portree photo and upload it.

5] You have now uploaded the photo to the public folder on your Dropbox website and it has a URL. To get the URL: right click the photo > copy public link > Enter it into a new browser tab to see that it works.

6] Now we will access it in Google Earth. Click ‘temporary places’ folder to make it active. Create a placemark anywhere and in the dialog box :
- Name it ‘Anywhere photo’ > Click ‘Add image’ > paste the photo URL > click OK
- Back in Google Earth click the placemark you have created. You should see a pop up balloon appear with your photo in it.