Google Earth Expedition Gallery #2 – E-Base Video Story

This is the second entry in a series of expedition based Google Earth tours from Digital Explorer. We will be publishing a new tour everyday for the next couple of weeks. The E-Base video story Google Earth tour allows you to follow the E-Base Goes Live Expedition day-by-day with geo-located videos, as the team work to put up wind turbines in Antarctica.

Download the Google Earth tour – E-Base Video Story

You will need Google Earth to view the tour. If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it for free:

Contact Digital Explorer, if you would like to make a Google Earth tour for your expedition or fieldwork.

Google Earth Expedition Gallery #1 – Living in Antarctica

This is the first tour in the Google Earth Expedition Gallery from Digital Explorer. Follow the team from Digital Explorer, npower and 2041, as they find about life in Antarctica during their time on King George Island on the E-Base Goes Live Expedition in March 2009.

Download the Google Earth tour – Living in Antarctica

You will need Google Earth to view the tour. If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it for free:

Contact Digital Explorer, if you would like to make a Google Earth tour for your expedition or fieldwork.

Expeditions need to inspire as well as discover

There has been a lot in the press recently about the campaign for the reactivation of the Society’s multidisciplinary research projects to greatly advance geographical science and knowledge (for more information see the Beagle Campaign’s website). The campaign has come about because the Society is perceived to be overly focused on funding other people’s research and is not taking a lead in putting its own multi-disciplinary teams in the field to reveal much needed information about our ever changing world.

So how do these two approaches fit with the exploration philosophy held by Digital Explorer. We believe that exploration, expeditions, field projects – call it what you will – should have four main steps.

Explore and go out into the world to seek new information and knowledge that is critical to advance our understanding of the world and how best humankind can enjoy and conserve the planet and its diverse peoples, species and environments.

Discover through the proper application of research methods as well as incorporating the wealth of indigenous knowledge into our understanding. Exploration is not just about travel, but a journey or field-based project with real rigour.

Share your findings with others and more widely than a narrowly read tome, gathering dust somewhere. There are so many engaging and inspiring ways of doing this. A minimum target for any expedition should be to reach 1,000 people who you didn’t know before you left.

Engage others to act. Knowledge is all very well and good, but no amount of knowledge and research alone will encourage the wider public to change behaviours and attitudes, needed for sustainable future. Without engagement we will all be better informed, and yet still unmoved.

There are expeditions that do fulfil these criteria, operating outside the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society. Expeditions that fulfil not just a need for good field science, but also seek to stir emotions and inspire change. The Society is the only British institution in a position to coordinate truly inspiring scientific journeys and projects, that have at their core a desire to find out more about our planet, and to share these discoveries through powerful stories that speak to people on a emotional level.

If facts and figures could save the world, there wouldn’t be a need to have this conversation.

Social Publishing

Just come across issuu and thought I would give it a go. Here’s one of the Digital Explorer manuals hosted on their site.

Get your own – Open publication

Using Google Earth – technical hitches and what to do

This is a follow-up post to the recent Google Earth courses in London, Belfast and Edinburgh.

During these courses a number of technical issues arose that can present a barrier to implementing Google Earth successfully in the classroom. Here’s a list of the issues and what to do…

Installing Google Earth
Google Earth is free to download from earth.google.com. In Northern Ireland, the free version is available via C2K. In other areas, consult your school IT support. If your IT is managed by RM, there is a blueprint available from the RM website (this will make sense to your school IT support).

Using Internet Explorer to open images
I wrongly assumed that all Internet Explorer settings would be the same for opening images from the heard drive. If you cannot see the file path and name of the image you would like to insert into a placemark description when you use Internet Explorer, you will need to make the following changes:

• in the top menu, select ‘View’ > ‘Toolbars’ > ‘Address Bar’
• the ‘Address Bar’ may now appear in full or as a grey box in the top left hand corner
• try to ‘drag’ the grey box down show it show in full
• if this does not seem to work, right click the grey box and click on ‘Lock the Toolbars’ to remove the tick and try again

Google Earth slows up or the screen is grey
This is a network issue. If you have an important lesson with a class of pupils accessing Google Earth at the same time, you should warn your IT support in school in advance and they will help you manage the network to maximise your chances of a trouble-free lesson. If the screen does go grey, simply close Google Earth and restart the application (NB remember to save any work first).

Images show as grey boxes in placemark descriptions
This can be for a number of reasons. Check the manual and your notes to make sure that you have typed the correct code. It can also be because of ‘zip’ settings on your local network. KMZ files require Google Earth to ‘unpack’ the images associated with your KMZ files. There may be settings in place that will stop this from happening. These are in place as a number of computer viruses are sent as ‘zip’ files. Talk to your IT support if this seems to be a problem.

Complete meltdown, confusion or panic
Please do comment or contact Digital Explorer if you have any other problems.

Google Earth in the classroom

I have just got back from running a Google Earth course in Edinburgh and two last week in Belfast. The next two weeks have two courses in Birmingham, two in Newcastle and two in Southampton.

I thought I would make things easier for teachers who have been / are coming on courses, by adding links to some previous posts about using Google Earth in the classroom and specifically about the whole Google Earth Plus / Pro license situation for UK schools.

Click here for the post about obtaining a free Google Earth Pro license for your school

Click here to read more about purchasing Google Earth Plus licenses for your school

If you would like access to resources connected to Google Earth training see the training pages.

There is also information, resources and a video about using Google tools to do fieldwork in the school grounds.

Thank you to all the participants over the past two weeks. There have been a few technical issues with using Google Earth in an educational networked environment and I will blog about these separately.

Here’s what course participants have created…

Participant Google Earth files, Belfast Course 04/11/2008

Participant Google Earth files, Edinburgh Course 11/11/2008

Please do comment with any more thoughts on how to apply the course content in the classroom or on expedition. Also, please comment with any suggestions about fieldwork areas that do not have high resolution imagery and could be updated to enable Google Earth to be used effectively. No promises about any changes, but I’ll pass the information on!

Reaching a wider audience – the cost of quality

Innovation in technology and design means money and time. Nothing that Digital Explorer does is radically new nor are the methods we use different from what thousands of others are doing. So what’s the difference?

Quality.

I have watched YouTube videos that pupils have made. It’s always quite exciting to see which teachers have been secretly filmed. If you’re a teacher and never searched YouTube for your school, it can be quite revealing. The quality of these videos is pretty poor, and not just the content. Sound quality, framing, narrative, soundtrack, etc. are all out of the window. However, for a small group of people they are interesting and amusing. Quality in web video production gives you access to a greater audience.

There are blogs that I read that are easy to navigate, well laid out and full of interesting content. On some blogs, the design really adds to the content, giving a sense of place, ideas and inspiration. Others are truly shocking, full of garish fonts and mis-sized photographs, with dull headlines and lack of decent opening paragraphs. Again, unless you have a very particular interest in the person/people writing the blog or the content, you will not browse, but move on.

When Digital Explorer started, the inspirations were the model of the broadcast news journalist reporting from across the world, and the rigour of the professional expedition. Digital Explorer remains adamant that no compromise should be made in terms of quality, but that costs money.

A curriculum for the digital global citizen would include…

• the skills to shoot, edit and upload a quality digital video (nothing more complicated than an establishing shot, a few interviews with proper framing and decent sound quality, and maybe an appropriate cut-away or three)
• the skills to create or identify an engaging, appropriate and accessible online platform (blog, ning, social networking group or page, etc.) and the ability to write engaging content with a mix of digital media to back it up (photos, video and maps)
• an appreciation and knowledge of digital mapping technologies and how they can help to inform and contextualise issues online
• the ability to apply these skills to learning in Citizenship, English, Geography and Science taught curricula, so that any digital content has proper rigour in terms of research methods and young people understand how to create change

This curricula involves money and time. Who will build this capacity outside of the current taught curriculum? Where will the money for additional hardware come from? Who will link these new skills to local, national and global issues?

In the future, Digital Explorer wants to grow its current programmes to become a techno-eco-scout movement for the 21st Century.

Give young people the skills they need to become leaders.

We are failing them if we don’t.

ICT in Geography

ICT in secondary schools: a short guide for teachers, edited by David Mitchell and produced by the GA with the support of the RGS-IBG and Becta, outlines some of the most important ICT available for teaching and learning geography, both in and outside the classroom. Drawing on the work of geography teachers and what they find really works, each short chapter takes a separate area of technology and explains, in simple terms, its meaning, why it is helpful for teaching and learning geography, and practical steps to get started.

Digital Explorer’s work is highlighted in the section on Virtual Fieldwork, written by Jamie Buchanan-Dunlop.

Ofsted views support [de]’s work

The Learning outside the classroom report by Ofsted published this month comes out in strong support of the value of learning outside the classroom in raising pupil motivation and attainment.

What was particularly good to see, was that some of the points raised by Ofsted directly support Digital Explorer’s work.

Learning outside the classroom was most successful when it was an integral element of long-term curriculum planning and closely linked to classroom activities.

This is exactly what the expedition to Dubai and Oman achieved, with every pupil at one school involved in curriculum learning in every subject based on the expedition.

The second section that supports Digital Explorer’s work:

Some schools have made an explicit link between the use of school grounds and education for sustainable development. They effectively promote pupils’ understanding that care for their immediate surroundings is the first step in caring for their planet [...] The survey showed that primary schools were more effective than secondary schools in using their grounds and locality to support learning about sustainability.

These findings were backed up by the recommendation that leadership and management need to:

[...] make better use of the grounds and immediate locality to promote learning outside the classroom

The manual on School Grounds Projects enables schools to do exactly this and is designed for the secondary curriculum.

Two great days’ training

Thank you to all the participants at the past two days’ training at the Royal Geographical Society. It’s been great getting the courses underway for the 2008/9 academic year.

I promised participants that I would post their work on the blog, but unfortunately some of the advanced work was lost with Google Earth being closed down before I could get to it.

Participant Google Earth files, RGS-IBG Course 21/10/2008

Participant Google Earth files, RGS-IBG Advanced Course 22/10/08

Please do comment with any more thoughts on how to apply the course content in the classroom or on expedition.