Turning the Supertanker

I have created a short video using Google Earth, illustrating the kinds of ideas that I have discussed in previous posts.  This video has been created to illustrate to junior students on the Supertanker exactly where in the world the Olympics will be taking place from Friday.  I went further and created a flypast of the Olympic venue buildings that have been created and in Google Sketchup  and placed into Google Earth.  I could have added additional information like the names of the buildings and could have juxtaposed it with other buildings in Beijing that have been created in Sketchup.  You will note too that I turned on terrain so that the horizon is not uniformly flat!

Stumble It!

This is a view in Google Earth of my home and Mount Wellington in the background.  I built the model in Sketchup, a really easy process.  I worked off of the plans that I have, however a measuring tape would have done just as well!  Once the model was completed I opened up Google Earth and found my home’s location then imported that location into Sketchup, toggled the terrain to ‘on’ and then oriented the model onto the terrain.  Now whenever I open Google Earth my 3-D model will be there, better still I have now shared this model by uploading it to the Google Earth 3-D warehouse for anyone to download if they so desire.  Even better than that is the fact that after scrutiny, the model, if successful will become part of Google Earth’s 3-D buildings layer and will be visible to all who use Google Earth.  You can locate  the model in the 3-D warehouse by using the search term ‘Glendowie House.”

As I said in an earlier post, this whole process would be a good project for schools to take on.  By breaking down their school into individual buildings, groups of students could be responsible for measuring and building to scale in Sketchup their school buildings.  Once completed they could then be compiled into a collection of buildings on their own Google Earth programme, or indeed share for others to view and fly around in 3-D using Google Earth.

Anyone interested in joining the project?  A great measurement exercise for a long term maths project…  I will be getting students on the Supertanker to embark on this process in the coming weeks and months, I just need a donor class to pick up this particular baton…  If you do build a model of your school and share it in Google Earth, please let me know so that I can share this information with others.

I have been giving some thought recently on how to use Google Earth in the classroom. I have come up with an idea that could be applied to many different situations. It kind of follows on from my Amazing Journeys initiative. Why not I reasoned, use Google Earth to record the amazing journey? Now those of you who have yet to strap a camera to your bike, car or head can create your journey to work from the comfort of your computer screen!

The latest version of Google Earth (4.3) has some new cool features, principal amongst these is the fact that the terrain is now bumpy, so that you can create virtual tours of physical features in simulated 3D. What the developers have done is to overlay the 2D satellite image onto a 3D mesh. I made some very convincing fly pasts and fly-arounds of some of the volcanoes in the Auckland caldera yesterday; a potentially very useful tool for the classroom, especially when recorded and saved offline for future use and band width preservation! Imagine doing the same with Ruapehu, or some other such feature that is otherwise difficult to get to or impractical to organise. The fly pasts come into their own when used in conjunction with the angle of view tool. I can see a video tutorial coming up…

In addition, I could also see applications for incorporating Google Sketch Up projects. I did a fly around of our school and it was kind of cool, but flat, however if you fly into the centre of most cities some individuals have gone to the effort of creating and sharing 3D models made in Sketch Up of their building. I think that individual classes could take on the project of creating their own block or class and adding the resultant 3D models to Google and adding to the 3D virtual world that Google Earth is encouraging and enabling its users to create. There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to use Sketch Up and crucially, how to apply photos to the surfaces to paint the buildings with images in the same way that the satellite images of Google Earth have been painted onto the bumpy terrain of Google Earth 4.3.

The video below is a chronology of locations that I have lived in, using Google Earth and Placemarks to create the video. I reasoned that this task could be applied to many different situations and curriculum areas. It could be applied to places of work, to schools attended, even to historical events, especially when combined with Panoramio. Google Earth is rapidly becoming an indespensible tool in my armoury.

The quality of this video is low, but the original full screen version shows all the details, but you will get the idea…