Making History

Notes Wed. June 25

Summercore

Google Earth

Uses in class – tour of DC trip, extension with air quality overlay (Sarah), looking at a glacier in Chile.

New version includes street view – zoom right in to see the street.

Top – search

Bottom – layers, transparent overlays (changes all the time, they keep adding more)

Click on primary database to turn off all the layers.  Lynne recommends keeping street view turned on.  Weather is fun to keep on – this is in real time!  Doppler radar also, and conditions and forecast.

The more you zoom in the more information you can see from the layers.

When a big visible thing happens (flood, tidal waves) usually there is an overlay very soon to see the damage.

Boarders and Labels can be useful – good for political geography

Most interesting are gallery and global awareness layers – constantly being revised and added to.  There is a well known one on Darfur created by the USHM

You can turn on the layers one at a time, so you don’t have too much information.  You can do this on for tours you create or ones that other people create (she showed the Darfur example).

PLACES – this is the middle area.  This is where the guided tours will reside.  They are saved in kml –keynote markup language (because Google Earth was first created by a company called Keynote)  These tours are written in html, very little, but it is html

When you double click on a kml file it opens google earth.

Example – Odyssey.  Ironically he never went very far, he just traveled a lot – this might tell us something about his personality!

Press play and the tour will start.

In preferences, always check “Show balloon when tour is paused” (under touring)

You can also set “Tour Pause”  length – useful in class. Also in preferences.

Examples – guided tour of Paris as a scavenger hunt.  They had a number of eros to spend, and they had to go to a list of places, and things to do.  (eat, go to the movies, take the metro)  Then they had to blog about it in France. 

History example – Ancient Egypt and the Great Pyramids (teacher was reluctant, but said it was great).

Used the view to discuss why they built them where they did.

Then she used a tour done in Google Sketchpad of the Kind Tuts tomb

So how do you find these cool things that are already done?

Earth.google.com

Go to gallery (on the left)

The other way to find them is in regular old google – do an advanced search and search for a specific file type

But, there are two kinds of Google Earth files, kml and kmz

(a kmz file is a zipped kml file)

Example – baseball park with file type kml

When you find what you want you ctrl click and save link as

Google Sky – there are different layers for the sky (click Saturn on the top)