Category: geography
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Explorations enroute to and in Christchurch, New Zealand
After around a 12 hour flight from Los Angeles, I arrived safely in Auckland, New Zealand, on Monday morning (today) around 6 am. My flight from Auckland to Christchurch was uneventful, and I spent most of the day exploring Christchurch with my host mum (AFS 1987) Shirley. I recorded a two minute Qik video (with…
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Mountains on the descent into Portland
I’m here for three days in Portland, Oregon, attending and presenting at the 2009 ITSC (Instructional Technologies Strategies Conference.) I’ve updated my blog handouts page with links to my five sessions, two of which are repeats. I absolutely LOVE mountains. As a “flatlander” growing up in Kansas and spending most of my adult life living…
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Podcast299: Dreaming of the Storychaser’s Peace Train
This podcast is a bit of an ecclectic mix of ideas, song snippets, and educational project ideas. Foundationally, these relate to the idea that we’re going to have an enduring need to help younger students as well as older learners use digital tools in powerful, appropriate, and constructive ways. Whether we use the words citizen…
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Geotagged iReports from President Obama’s Inauguration
The iReporters were out in mass yesterday, and the geo-tagged map of their submissions to CNN looks quite different than it did right before inauguration day. Before: After: I love these types of mashups involving storychasing (citizen journalism and digital storytelling) with geographic maps. Geotagged content offers great opportunities for exploratory learning. Technorati Tags: cnn,…
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An Oklahoma City to Kansas City Amtrak Connection may be coming!
This is a GREAT piece of news for our family, and possibly for yours if like us you LOVE TRAINS and travel in the midwestern United States. We’re getting closer to restored passenger rail service between Oklahoma City and Kansas City! This past Saturday afternoon, we had the pleasure of taking a driving trolley tour…
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Connecting place to stories with Google Maps
“The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming is a wonderful example of a multi-part, text-based digital story related as a Google Maps mashup. More background information about this story is available on Charles’ blog. Unfortunately the story does not appear to be embeddable, so you’ll have to click the story link itself to view it. This…
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GPS learning in the air and on the highway
This past week I used my Garmin GPS unit in the air on my flight back from Boston and MASSCUE to Oklahoma City, as well as on a drive today from OKC up to Kansas for Ron Prince’s final football game as head coach at Kansas State. This was the first time I’ve used the…
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Website visitor tracking with Feedjit and ClustrMaps
ClustrMaps and feedjit.com continue to be my two favorite tools for tracking website visitors. Feedjit provides real-time visitor tracking showing not only the countries associated with web visitors’ IP addresses, but also the web browser, computer operating system, and search site the visitor used (if any) to link to your website. If a search query…
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Visualizing field trip school visitors with Google Maps
Today I created a Google Map highlighting the locations of schools which have sent students on field trips (many of them FREE thanks to a generous grant from Dell as well as funding from the OHA Teen Board) to the Oklahoma Heritage Association and Gaylord-Pickens Museum in Oklahoma City so far during the 2008-2009 school…
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Visually exploring earth with Panoramio
In preparing for week 4 of the Wednesday night class I’m teaching this term on Google Earth at our church, I discovered the website and Google Earth layer Panoramio. Panoramio is one of three layers which come with Google Earth under the top category “Geographic Web.” Photographs are submitted by Panoramio’s users to be included…