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.  

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.	Major	Minor	Best Practice Description	Evidence
1	Producing Process	Iteration and testing	GETs should be generated in an iterative process that incorporates user testing.	Scholarly
2		Student focus	Production of GETs should be student-focused; in particular educational value should be promoted above flashy presentation.	Scholarly
3	GET Slides	Narration, Annotations and Labels	Within a GET slide, narration should be delivered by audio narration alone.	Empirical
4			Audio narration should relate to what is on screen at the time.	Empirical
5			Labels and annotations should be close in space and time to the map elements they are describing.	Empirical
6			Labels and annotations should be used often but without impacting visual clarity.	Empirical
7		Chart Junk	In formal educational contexts, graphical and audio elements not directly connected with the educational message should be removed.	Empirical
8		Personalization	Within a GET narration should use less formal language	Empirical
9		Using Animations	Within a GET rates of change of variables such as population growth are better depicted on a graph than on a map as a changing color or symbol.	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	The camera in a GET should be kept orientated northwards and vertically downwards, unless the subject of the GET requires viewing from an angle.	Empirical
13		Looped Paths and Overviews	In GET flights between two low altitude slides GET flight paths should always pass through a high loop which encompasses both locations in the same view.	Empirical
14			If possible a GET should start and end at high altitude capturing the important points, lines or areas the GET describes in one view.	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	In a landscape, which has few strong natural landmarks such as roads or coastlines, a static, north-south oriented grid should be added unless it  creates a cluttered view.	Scholarly
17			The grid should have a line separation of a suitable round figure to give a sense of scale.  If a grid is not applicable, scale can be included as a line on the ground representing some round figure.	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