For my studio project, I have continued playing with Google Earth, and created a virtual tour of the Indiana University Campus. Google Earth really is a pretty amazing tool and the more I got into it, the more you realize how much it could do. The first thing that I did to learn about Google Earth is to go to the website and watched the tutorial videos. Some of the information I already knew, but I learned a lot of good stuff from them too.
The first thing that I did was to learn how to create and save 'markers' to your places. This is a pretty neat feature because it allows you to enter text, hyperlinks, and even save the precise view of the place you see in Google Earth. In order to not have the tour become too long for this, I chose about 6 places on the IU campus that I thought were interesting to show. From a benefit point of view, I think there could be huge benefits from the university to embrace and use this (and it looks like they have based on the number of 3-D buildings that have been created). A virtual tour could be used in recruiting prospective students, highlighting a particular part of campus, or just being used by anyone who is curious to find out more about the campus.
Once you have all of the 'markers' in your places, then I started to actually create a 'tour'. This worked ok, and I did have some setbacks. The first limitation is that while Google Earth does give some control over how the movement occurs between markers, i
t can be difficult to get the settings correct and sometimes it would zoom way out, before zooming back in to the next marker. One other major problem that I encountered is that you can narrate your tour using a microphone, but it seemed to cut out after about a minute and a half. I don't know why it cut our, but I had to use QuickTime to get a good screen recording for the tour, but my actual Google Earth tour file, only has audio for the first part of the tour. The third major problem that I found is that in trying to set up and join the Google Earth community so that I could post my tour and share it with others, I was never able to sign up for a new account. I tried on several occasions using all kinds of combination, but it always gave me an error message that the user name was already taken. I was never able to set up an account to join the community. To work around this, I had to same my screencast as a movie and upload it to YouTube. The video is embedded below and in some ways this would be more beneficial as more people could view it, but having the tour inside of Google Earth allows for much greater interactivity and exploration which is important for the learning process. I could share the .kmz file (Google Earth Tour file type) directly with others and they would be able to open up the tour on their own machine, but it still has the problem of no audio.
I had to redo the video, hopefully this link and the above video will be working shortly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRFf51mVjxU
Overall I think that Google Earth is pretty fascinating. Allowing users to upload video, pictures, tours, 3-D models and other artifacts to the platform make it very interesting. Hopefully it will continue to be around for a long time and it will get the support that it needs from both Google and the users.
The first thing that I did was to learn how to create and save 'markers' to your places. This is a pretty neat feature because it allows you to enter text, hyperlinks, and even save the precise view of the place you see in Google Earth. In order to not have the tour become too long for this, I chose about 6 places on the IU campus that I thought were interesting to show. From a benefit point of view, I think there could be huge benefits from the university to embrace and use this (and it looks like they have based on the number of 3-D buildings that have been created). A virtual tour could be used in recruiting prospective students, highlighting a particular part of campus, or just being used by anyone who is curious to find out more about the campus.
Once you have all of the 'markers' in your places, then I started to actually create a 'tour'. This worked ok, and I did have some setbacks. The first limitation is that while Google Earth does give some control over how the movement occurs between markers, i
t can be difficult to get the settings correct and sometimes it would zoom way out, before zooming back in to the next marker. One other major problem that I encountered is that you can narrate your tour using a microphone, but it seemed to cut out after about a minute and a half. I don't know why it cut our, but I had to use QuickTime to get a good screen recording for the tour, but my actual Google Earth tour file, only has audio for the first part of the tour. The third major problem that I found is that in trying to set up and join the Google Earth community so that I could post my tour and share it with others, I was never able to sign up for a new account. I tried on several occasions using all kinds of combination, but it always gave me an error message that the user name was already taken. I was never able to set up an account to join the community. To work around this, I had to same my screencast as a movie and upload it to YouTube. The video is embedded below and in some ways this would be more beneficial as more people could view it, but having the tour inside of Google Earth allows for much greater interactivity and exploration which is important for the learning process. I could share the .kmz file (Google Earth Tour file type) directly with others and they would be able to open up the tour on their own machine, but it still has the problem of no audio.I had to redo the video, hopefully this link and the above video will be working shortly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRFf51mVjxU
Overall I think that Google Earth is pretty fascinating. Allowing users to upload video, pictures, tours, 3-D models and other artifacts to the platform make it very interesting. Hopefully it will continue to be around for a long time and it will get the support that it needs from both Google and the users.
