CSV uploads in Digimap for Schools

I've worked on a range of resources for Digimap for Schools and Digimap for Colleges over the last few years, and am always excited when a new tool is added.
Three new tools were added this week.
You'll need to login and then look at the ADD MARKER dropdown options to see them.

Stickman marker could be used to mark human influence on an area, and colour coded for good or bad impact e.g. in a National Park, or along a stretch of coastline...

Grid Reference marker will be useful for adding them to printed maps which are used for fieldwork purposes, so that they can be used by students, perhaps in association with the OS Locate app.

You can now also add in CSV files of locations.
There is a help page for this function.

Read the blog post to find out more. The upload function won't work if you are using DfS on an iPad

Don't forget that printed maps also now have a north arrow included on them.

Field Notes Earth

Field Notes Earth is a new app from ESRI which extracts information from the Living Atlas.

Field Notes-Earth is a small sampling of the amazing questions that can be answered from the Esri Living Atlas of the World. To learn more about Esri content, visit http://livingatlas.arcgis.com 

This app shares the power of geographic information through a common language to describe the landscape of the Earth.

1. Choose a place, such as your hometown, to learn interesting facts about population, nature, and physical landscapes.
2. Choose a second location to compare and contrast the differences.

These types of comparisons help us to better understand the differences in our landscapes and allow meaningful conversations on how to manage and protect our resources.

I had a play, comparing different places. This could work for different locations which are provided by the teacher for students to compare e.g. different land-use zones, biomes or different locations within a specific country e.g. population densities, urban areas etc.

Here's some screenshots.

GE Grids

Thanks to Mark Brandon for the tipoff to this article on land use change...

Using Google Earth to map land use changes in East Africa "free, simple, transparent " #OA http://t.co/G5xftTdPEd

— Mark Brandon (@icey_mark) July 10, 2015

My interest was piqued by the mention of GE Grids.
This is described as follows:

 GE Grids is the first free, customizable creator of raster datasets for use with Google Earth. GE Grids creates a user-defined, interactive grid (raster) overlaid on Google Earth image data. This tool circumvents expensive, specialized programs and knowledge, and enables easy use of Google Earth's high-resolution data to create localized datasets.

I need to explore this I think

New version of ArcGIS Online

A new version of ArcGIS Online was released today.
There are some changes to UI and Workflow, many of which won't be noticeable to casual users, but some additional changes to the tools and mapping options, and also the Scenes, which are an exciting option.
You can read about the changes here.

Google MyMaps in Google Drive

You can now make your own MyMaps from within Google Drive...