Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


rich treves

How to use the new Google Earth Tour Builder

Rich Treves at Google Earth Design has provided some great resources over the years such as an animated flood map of London and a variety of Google Earth-based resources for teachers.

He recently reviewed the Google Earth Tour Builder and now has produced a nice video to help show people how to use it.

It’s an amazing tool and has wide array of possibilities.  Check out his full post here, or try it for yourself at tourbuilder.withgoogle.com.

Great work, Rich!

More great Google Earth resources for teachers

Last month we shared some great tips for you on how to use Google Earth in academic settings as the school year was kicking off.  Rich Treves at Google Earth Design has taken it further and launched a new site dedicated to this area called GEforTeachers.com.  The site offers registration and login features (which may be of value to you), but it also allows you to choose “guest” to just hop in and try it out for yourself.

treves-teaching

The site offers a few directions for you to choose from:

  • Six ‘core’ introductory video tutorials to help you get started if you’re a newbie
  • Four extra video tutorials, also suitable for beginners
  • Advanced Resources – for those with advanced Google Earth skills

Beyond that, Rich offers a few additional tips:

  • Practice using Google Earth. You won’t get much out of the videos just watching them.  In particular, I recommend you read our thoughts on how to understand the options available in Google Earth, and then follow some tips on how to navigate effectively through Google Earth.
  • Complete the multiple choice questions, they’re there to help you track when you’ve lost concentration a bit and need to revisit the tutorial (you need to register to do this).
  • Print out the ‘cheat sheet’ which has text notes to help you practise in Google Earth

You can read more about it on Rich’s site, or go try it out for yourself at GEforTeachers.com.

Using Google Earth to understand geomorphology

Geomorphology is “the scientific study of landforms and the processes that shape them“, which seems to make Google Earth an excellent tool for that kind of work.  Holly Dolliver recently wrote a paper about using Google Earth to teach geomorphology, the abstract for which can be found here.

ox-bow-lake

Rich Treves at Google Earth Design read the paper and saw many examples that were showcased, but then he found that there was no KML file available to view them all — so he created one!

You can grab his KML file here and dig into to some of Holly’s finds. Rich has a few specific notes about the file and how to make the most of it over on his blog.

Good work, Rich!

The Powers of Ten, centered on your house

We’ve discussed the groundbreaking “Powers of Ten” video on GEB a few times (the last being in December), as Google Earth is amazing platform to explore some of the concepts in the film.  If you’ve not yet seen it, you can view the video here:

A while back, Rich Treves at Google Earth Design posted a KMZ file that allowed you to explore the video in Google Earth.  He’s now taken it a step further and (with the help of his friend Michael) created a script that allows you to enter a location and have the blue squares generated with your location in the center.  Here’s what mine looks like:

powersoften

You can read about this new script on his blog, or visit this page to have your custom file created.  He’s hoping to add a tour feature to it in the future, but for now you can zoom in and out manually to see the various squares.

Great work, Rich!