A long, long time ago many people thought the earth was flat. Today, we know it’s not. In fact, according to HERODOT, the European Network for Geography in Higher Education, these days, it’s cubed.
Geocube is an engaging, FREE, online resource devoted to the exploration of geography. With an interface based on the appearance of a Rubik Cube, its six faces and 54 topics invite users to learn more about our planet.
environment, reference, science, visualization
geo, geography, image, images, video
Science, Social Studies, and Geography teachers who want to grab student attention are using GigaPan because the site has images so big, so rich in detail that students want to concentrate and carefully explore them. Whether examining a scene from Venice in advance of discussing the history of Italy or poring over an electron microscope photograph of an ant’s head for discussion in Biology, learners crave the amazing clarity GigaPan delivers.
Supplying simple navigation tools, GigaPan makes it easy for pupils to collect, catalog, and analyze details as they wander about inside its panoramic pictures. When used with interactive whiteboards like those produced by GTCO, Promethean, and SMARTBoard, learning becomes efficient, effective, and exciting. The site is an offshoot of the Global Connection Project, (a joint effort among Carnegie Mellon University, NASA, Google, and National Geographic) and is dedicated to eliminating barriers between humans and helping individuals everywhere learn more about our planet by increasing the power of images to “connect, inform, and inspire people to become engaged and responsible global citizens.”
Digital images are composed of a pixels (or pix as in pictures and elements). Note that pixels are not necessiarily square picture elements. Many people regularly capture images with megapixel cameras. Megapixel images are composed of 1 million pixels. Gigapixel images, however, like those used in the panoramic images featured at GigaPan and the Gigapxl Project contain 1 billion pixels.
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Uncategorized, nature, science
geo, geography, gigapixel, images, megapixel, photo, pixel, science, social-studies
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is a handy programming language that every educator and student should appreciate and explore. It’s great! KML was originally created by a company called Keyhole, Inc. that derived its name from KH reconnaissance satellites, the original eye-in-the-sky military reconnaissance satellites that were first launched in 1976. KML is very, very useful for representing geographic-related information. If you’ve got geographic information, digitize that data and KML will help you display it with impressive clarity on a computerized map. It’s no wonder that KML was developed for use with Google Earth, a super-spiffy digital globe.
So what happens when an inquisitive teacher or pupil judiciously combines KML with Google Earth or Google Maps? The results can be very powerful. Take, for example, kmlfactbook.org. It’s a resource that makes it easy for users to create customized Google Earth KML files from data-sets from sources such as
.
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data, geo, geography, google, maps, social-studies
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