Fieldwork with Google Earth GPS and video - some thoughts
Over half term my daughter and I carried out a short fieldwork investigation in Exeter’s CBD. We were looking to identify the boundary of the core and frame. We made a series of very short video clips and used a GPS to fix the locations.
I had a go at delimiting the core and the frame of the CBD using Google Earth polygons and added an overlay of the major new redevelopment at Princesshay.
Download the finished Google Earth file (You Tube version)
This Google Map shows the study area. The placemarks should also link to You Tube video clips but for some reason Google Maps is stripping out the video embedding code at the moment.
More thoughts
One purpose of the study was to illustrate the potential of Google tools for fieldwork. There are a couple of niggling issues though:
Getting GPS data into the free version of Google Earth
Google Earth Plus is needed if you want to import and display GPS information. [Please see the comments for a correction of this statement] This version of Google Earth isn’t really suitable for schools, however using a mobile phone with bluetooth GPS and GE Track is a good workaround since GE Track can export GPS data directly as KML.
(Incidentally this is a great solution for collecting data for OpenStreetMap, producing more accurate results than a handheld Garmin GPS).
Google Maps and video in placemarks
At the time of writing Google Maps seems to be stripping out the You Tube embedding code. It works initially, but then doesn’t save. I tried this over three days on different browsers and have come to the conclusion that it’s a Google Map bug (hopefully temporary)
YouTube versus Teacher Tube
Although is great to make resources like the Exeter example above, it’s also fairly pointless given the universal filtering of Google Video and You Tube in schools. One solution should be Teacher Tube, which does embed in Google Earth but the download speed is frustratingly slow. My broadband connection is four times faster than the site claims is necessary to prevent the buffering problems, however if they do manage to improve the efficiency of their servers, this looks like being the best option for embedded educational videos.
I’ve created a second version of the Exeter Google Earth file that links to the videos on Teacher Tube for comparison purposes.
Download Exeter CBD (Teacher Tube version)
Update 19/1/08
Teacher Tube appears to be working a lot faster now.
Google Earth can open a GPX file directly, so you can use any program that downloads data from a GPS and saves it in GPX format. I have a whole series on my blog on ways to duplicate much of the functionality of Google Earth Plus (live GPS connection, spreadsheet import, etc.) for free or minimal cost:
http://freegeographytools.com/2007/recap-of-google-earth-plus-for-free-series
Thanks Leszek. That’s a very useful page you have there! Since I’ve upgraded to GE Plus I wasn’t able to check that GE could open GPX files and hadn’t realized the standard version could do this.
I too use a separate BT receiver (iBT-GPS - it’s really excellent - very sensitive, even indoors) as that way it works with my S60 phone (Nokia 6630), Palm TX, and Dell laptop! On all of them I have Google-friendly apps. On my phone I use “Google Earth Companion”. I can strongly recommend this app — for under $9 I now have a full-function colour GPS with Google KML data logging. I also use GpsGate (free) plus their free Buddy Tracker web app to send my position live by GPRS to a Google map. GSM Tracker is another option for positoin tracking on-line, using the same Google maps option with GPSGate. On my Palm I have Google Earth Logger to collect KML data if I want. Also on the palm I have Compass and GeoNiche. The Dell only has OziExplorer as the other two are truly portable so I use them, err, portably!
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