Room With A View

With all the craziness of the last couple of weeks of school it’s been hard to find time to post. This will be brief.

I’ve been playing around a bit more with Google Earth and the grade seven trip to Chengde–China. I’ve now combined the waypoints from my GPS with the photos I took and posted to Flickr. I haven’t done it with all the waypoints as I’m hoping to get some kids to do it but I’ve done a few. [Link]

Here are some quick thoughts on how this might be used at school:

• Fieldtrips: kids combine waypoints, photos, and their writing to do trip summaries
• Fieldguides: students write guidebooks to historical sites (i.e. The Forbidden City). Use GPS so the user can go to the exact spot/artifact to read the information. The next step would be to podcast the information so users can listen to the guide on their iPods/mp3 players.
• Habitat For Humanity: Have kids take GPS units with them when they go out to build houses. They can mark the sites so they can check up on their projects later–perhaps years later.

Back to work!

Our grade seven students spent three days in Chengde last week. I went along and took along my hand held GPS. I used it to mark the places we went and now they can be loaded into Google Earth. Here are the technical details of how I did it.

As I said above I used my GPS to mark some of the places we went. Next I used GPS Babel to download the waypoints to my computer and convert the file to .gpx format which can be read by Google Earth. Next I dragged and dropped the .gpx file onto an open Google Earth window and voila. I could see everything marked on the map. Finally, I uploaded the file to my class wiki so the kids can access it from home.