Google Earth Community: Eco-caching

Kids' Connect is a two day event for Years 5 – 7 students that encourages students and teachers to use technology to solve creative challenges in innovative ways. Brisbane Kids Connect 2008 was held at Walkabout Creek, Brisbane Forest Park, Australia where I presented a breakout called Eco-caching which focussed on the Effects of Global Warming and Climate Change on Brisbane Forest Park.

I created introductory activities where students learned to use the Garmin GPS60 to Mark Waypoints and GOTO Waypoints and generally become familiar with using the GPS. They participated in a small Eco-caching activity – solving clues to identify the particular Waypoint they should search for – the Eco-cache consisted of Tags identifying various animals plants and features of the Park – e.g. Echidna, Platypus, Lungfish, Bushfires, Spotted Quoll and Lantana weed.

We then went on a 3 km walk through the Park around Enoggera Reservoir on the Araucaria track – as we walked we made frequent stops where I pointed out features of the area and we discussed how Global Warming would affect the ecosystem – e.g the explosion of weeds likely, effects of increased bushfire, loss of habitat, endangered species, effects of Drought and Cyclones. Students marked Waypoints at each of these points and took photographs to illustrate.

On their return to the classroom students downloaded the Waypoints and photos to Google Earth Pro and iPHOTO on Apple Mac computers. To illustrate the impact of Global Warming and Climate change they added content to the Placemarks created by typing in descriptive text and embedded the photos they took. They created a Tour using interesting perpectives by using Snapshot view. Some of the more able students used iMOVIE to create a Video Podcast where they used the photos, voiceover, recorded bird calls and their movie from Google Earth Pro .

The event was highly successful and Eco- caching went well although I discovered the difficulties of using GPS in the bush under tree canopy – not good!. We also had our share of ICT problems in a crowded venue with limited Internet access .

In preparing for this breakout I had to learn how to use GEPro with the Mac - I was disappointed to find that the movie of the Tour would not open the balloons. I hope this can be fixed in future versions. I had to work hard to figure out how to get the filename for photos on the Mac ( open with Safari – easy once you know!) I think it would be helpful if this were posted in the GE tutorials . We had a couple of occasions where the dreaded spinning wheel popped up on the Macs on GEPro – and the only way to get rid of it was to Force Quit – one group students lost all the embedded data from their Placemarks – I realised the importance of saving KMZ files at frequent intervals just in case.