Share your Ideas and KMZs...

There's a lot of geographers out there using Google Earth in interesting ways.
Why not share your ideas, and move towards being a COLLABORATOR rather than an ISOLATOR.
Thanks to Quentin d'Souza for allowing use of his image below. Which one most describes your practice and what can you do to move to the left ?

Google Earth and NASA

Ollie Bray made me aware of this via Boing Boing (getting hard these days to establish who does things first...) which is apparently the completion of something announced a while ago.
NASA are teaming up with Google Earth (and the National Geographic) to release NASA data in areas such as weather forecasting...
Could be useful for Geographers. I'll keep an eye out for more...

ViaTime

This post seems to have come out blank.
It was telling you about a virtual transportation simulator where you can set up an airline and see the routes in Google Earth.
Check out VIATIME for more. I'll try and have a play over Xmas.

Cambridge in 3D & Icelandic Posters

The first part of post comes via DIRECTIONS MAGAZINE and the Keyhole BULLETIN BOARD and OGLE EARTH. Thanks to all for the link.

Below is a general view looking down on Cambridge. Great work by Lattico, to add 3D Modelling - be warned though that this is a large file, and could take some time to load !
This will come in useful for us, as we take our 6th formers to Cambridge for a Human field day, and this will make our Virtual walk through even more lifelike. We use Google Earth for fieldtrip briefings.

Another find via Ogle Earth today was an interesting merging of two technologies I've used separately, but hadn't thought about putting together before. This is the work of Mr. Fjalar from Breidholt in Iceland, who has called his project ARTWORK EARTH. This is a rather nice idea which I may well borrow for an end of term project, or link in at the end of a unit of physical work such as COASTS, RIVERS, GLACIATION, VOLCANOES & EARTHQUAKES or NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS/BIOMES.Students are asked to find an image which looks particularly impressive artistically, perhaps like the one above, and save it - by screenshotting, or otherwise..

The images are then put into John Watson's superb BIG HUGE LABS' FLICKR TOYS site, which is one of my Top 5 sites of all time as those who are regular visitors to the website will know. (incidentally, having visited this today there's a new Warholizer which will make Warhol screenprint images out of your photos...)

The images are put into the MOTIVATOR tool, and then uploaded to the FLICKR POOL which this links to: ARTWORK EARTH.

Already this has been picked up and developed by others. This TAGZANIA post for example suggests using this idea to produce CHRISTMAS CARDS. I've already sent mine, or I might have used this idea myself...

And finally for this post, because I really have to get on to my marking...

Don't forget that if you're using Google Earth for a research project, you can use TOOLS and WEB to open a web browser window below the Google Earth view (or press CTRL and 8)
Might be a useful tip for some of you...

New Geographic Layers

Thanks to Frank Taylor at GEarth Blog for flagging up a new Geographic Layer option for Google Earth. This is a layer which needs to be turned on, but will then display Geographic content which increases as you zoom in. Worth investigating...

Planet Earth and Wiki Find

One of my other blogs was nominated for an Edublogs Award 2006 - I know because it was me that nominated me...
Unfortunately, I was passed over, but when I checked on the blogs that had been nominated I came across CLASSROOM GOOGLE EARTH Wiki.
There are some useful ideas for using Google Earth, and a recent posting led me to some High Definition Video Clips from the Planet Earth series.
Some useful Geography content here.Enjoying my Space Navigator - it's responsive and I'm getting the hang of the various axes of movement that are available. I love the ability to zoom right into details on images as well, which works very well on the IWB. Get one for Christmas! You can order one from 3D Connexion, delivery is very prompt.

Mystery Place and Space Navigator

Discovered this place today while flying around Google Earth with my Space Navigator.
Have been exploring the settings, and getting used to it....

UPDATE: The island is called CHRISTMAS ISLAND of course...

Sky News and Glaciers

Google Earth just been used by Sky News to zoom in to the location of a breaking news story.

Quite a few news networks are using Google Earth as a visual means of locating the news story they are reporting on.

Thanks to Noel Jenkins for flagging up a file mentioned on GEarth Blog which plots glaciers and whether they are advancing or retreating. Will be very useful !

Space Navigator and Google Earth in the papers

OK, so my Space Navigator is here, and I've installed it on my laptop and enjoyed zooming in and out of images and flying around the screen.
Will wait until Monday to try it with Google Earth at school (yes Noel, I'll show it at my Department meeting on Monday, and probably play about in my lessons too...)

Google Earth in the paper (The Times) today. There was an article explaining how it has been used in elections in Bahrain to show the opulent dwellings of the ruling family to try to sway public opinion. There was also a report on Google Sight Seeing. This has a section on the Top 10 naked people on Google Earth. You could use your Space Navigator to speed up exploration of this list...
Why not buy a copy. Click the Amazon link below to head there and buy a copy (or two - it's coming up for Christmas!)

Just noticed this is an old referral button. You only have to spend £15 now to get Free P&P.