Susan Anderson and Jim Holland are presenting this session and like the one before, it’s at capacity. It’s too bad that participants can’t sit on the floors, but they’re not being allowed to.
They’re main focus revolves around building Placemarks in Google Earth and how you can edit the contents of those placemarks so that there are images, formatted text, links to web resources, etc. Thinking about it, it’s likely that I know most of what they’ll get to today, but I’m always ready to hear a tip or trick I didn’t know.
I didn’t realize this before, but I see they have written a couple of books that cover this topic. They look like great resources…something that I could build a workshop from. I have a dozen GPS units that get checked out every now and it would be nice to get those tied in to Google Earth’s free resources.
Just looking at some of their examples, they have used the HTML features in the Placemarks to create some interactivity for students…being able to click in the Placemark bubble to link to the web. I’m not sure if I knew this, but the Placemarks allow embedded videos or VoiceThreads or Scrapblogs or whatever. Oh, I did know that, but it’s a Windows only feature so I didn’t get to play with it at the time.
As people were working along, a question arose about linking to images on the web. By linking to web images, you’re using up some of that site’s bandwidth. however, lots of sites such as Flickr, or PhotoBucket, or Pics4Learning are just fine with that. Just be aware of who you’re linking to.
Hey, here’s something new. If you create a KMZ file with an image…the image is part of the package. So you can use your own images from your hard drive, save it as a KMZ, send it to someone else, and they’ll get all the information, including the image!
We’re suffering from a connectivity issue, but the session is going well. As I suspected, they’re not going to get to some of the advanced Placemarks tips and tricks that I was hoping for. I know it’s probably in the book and it’s great to have a resource to turn to for that.
Oh, before I forget…Andy Mann passed on this Google Earth Workshop page he created for…a workshop. I thought this was as good a place as any to share that.
Filed under: curriculum, new tools | Tagged: google earth, n08s535, necc
