During his presentation Keene highlighted a number of features of Google Earth that make it a powerful tool for visualization and learning. This particular session was well attended with standing room only. Below are highlights of the topics he touched on and links to projects he shared with the group.

The Gallery Layer in Google Earth features data pulled in from other online services like:

• 360cities.net – Dedicated to promoting geo-mapped, VR panorama photography and VR photographers around the world.
• gigapan.org – An interesting service to explore in itself, GigaPan was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google. It is the newest development of the Global Connection Project, which aims to help meet neighbors across the globe, and learn about the planet. GigaPan consists of three technological developments: a robotic camera mount, custom software, and a new type of website for exploring, sharing and commenting on gigapixel panoramas.

Timeline imagery: in Google Earth 5 they’ve included all the historical satellite imagery they have. A number of projects are taking advantage of the historical data visualisation capabilities, as well as mashing additional information with it. Some projects mentioned were:

• http://henryhudson400.com
• http://www.heywhatsthat.com
• http://mashedworld.com
• http://demo.mapfish.org/mapfishsample/1.1/demos/
• http://earthatlas.info
• http://earthswoop.com

Tours in Google Earth
Dreaming New Mexico – Go to different sites in New Mexico
Google has posted many GE tours http://google.com/plugin/tours

How can you create your own tours

1. Record the tour in GE
2. Use the Google Earth plugin embed gadget to prepare the tour if you’d like to share it on your web site – http://www.gmodules.com/ig/creator
3. Copy/Paste code generated from the gadget into your web site

Google Earth Mashups

• Media integration – http://photoskml.googlepages.com/youtube.htm
• http://mapthefallen.org – a project using Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• http://planetinaction.com – The Earth as your playground
• http://barnabu.co.uk -contains a number of GE map mashups
• Google lit trips – Using Google Earth, students discover where in the world the greatest road trip stories of all time took place

If you’re interested in creating your own visualization using Google Earth keep in mind that you can make use of geotagging tools, GPS data, and GIS integration (in the case of GE Pro) to create your maps.

Great job, Keene, I really enjoyed your presentation.

Along that same line of thinking, the people at Mozilla have put together a set of FireFox addon “collections” for different types of web users – something we could easily put together for students. Recommendations for addons that connect to tools that make accessing, saving, and managing course resources, class conversations, and student research easier. A good place to start, right?

As we talk more and more about personal learning environments, browsers are appealing for their flexibility at the user-level that can be used to pull together various online resources. As a learning environment, browsers are centered around individuals, they can be highly customizable (assuming you use something like Firefox), and they put the student in control of the information. They also makes it possible for students to easily access classes they may be taking from different organizations, or even material they are studying independently, such as from the growing selection of open courseware material.

I could be corny and something to the effect of how browsers put the “P” in PLE, but I won’t, but what other tool offers the student, as an individual, the same level of control? Ok, maybe a notebook, but it can’t connect to the web. This whole idea depends on the answer to one question, though. Can schools make the materials in their online courses more portable so it is even possible for students to access and aggregate the pieces into something that works for them?

Advanced Dork: Gives quick access to Google’s Advanced Operators from the context menu
Aging Tabs: Colors tabs based on the last time the page was actively viewed
All-in-One Sidebar: Quickly switch between sidebar panels, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source or websites in the sidebar.
Attention Recorder: Record yor browser activity
Better GReader: Enhances Google Reader with Greasemonkey scripts. I use this to add an “add to del.icio.us” script to Google Reader.
Clear Cache Button: Clears your web cache with just one click
Colorzilla: Advanced eyedropper, color picker, and page zoomer
Colour Contrast Analyzer: examines the foreground and background colours of text nodes, and provides a report to see if they are correct according to AERT and WCAG’s luminosity colour contrast algorithm
CSS Viewer: Adds a flyout that displays CSS properties for different objects and elements on a page. Very handy.
del.icio.us Bookmarks: The Official Delicious Add-on seamlessly integrates your browser with del.icio.us, the leading social bookmarking service on the Web
deliGoo: deliGoo searches on the sites, indicated in your del.icio.us bookmarks. With its help you can find the necessary page according to any phrase or word, which it contains
Digg This: Adds Digg This! to the right-click menu, Tools menu, and optionally the toolbar
Diigo Toolbar for Firefox: Social Annotation – a superset of social bookmarking and more
Evernote Web Clipper: provides a toolbar button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to the EverNote Application as a new note. I’m not quite convinced that I like Evernote yet
Firebug: edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: Synchornize your bookmarks across multiple computers
Gmail Space: Use Gmail as online storage
Google Send to Phone: send text messages to your phone
Greasemonkey: Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Hundreds of scripts, for a wide variety of popular sites, are already available at http://userscripts.org. You can write your own scripts, too. Check out http://wiki.greasespot.net/ to get started.
JavaScript Debugger: a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Mozilla based browsers
MySocial24×7 Bar: A companion to FriendFeed that allows yout to explore Everyone’s, Your Friend’s, and Your Feed
Operator:leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services
Palette Grabber: Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, or OS X based on the current page
PDF Download: lets you know before trying to open it, and then offers you choices such as downloading, opening, or converting it straight to HTML
Poster: for interacting with web services and other web resources that lets you make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type. This allows you to interact with web services and inspect the results
powertwitter: allows you to add photos from Flickr and your YouTube videos directly in your tweets. It also unwinds the tiny URL’s
Professor X:let’s you see inside a page’s head without viewing the sourcecode
Resizeable Form Fields: Allows you to resize text areas
ScribeFire: a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog
Stylish: Customize the look of the application and of websites with Stylish, a user styles manager
Super DragAndGo: Drag a link or anything like a uri (e.g. “abc.com” ), and throw it to anywhere blank on the webpage to open the it in a new tab
Tab Mix Plus: includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager
The Coop: keep track of what your friends are doing online and share new and interesting content with them
ViewSourceWith: Extends view source fuctionality
Web Developer: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools
WideFox: MOve tabs to the side of the browser for vertical display. Great for browsers that keep may tabs open
Zotero: helps you collect, manage, and cite your research sources