How-to Guide – Playing Tours in Google Earth

Google Earth is such an amazing tool for learning. One of the features I love the most in Google Earth is recording and playing tours. Tours are virtual tours of places you can view from the comforts of your home. Many people argue that Google tours are useless since nothing can take place of a real field trip. I agree, nothing is like visiting a place in person and absorbing all the sights and sounds along with the vision. But honestly can you expect to follow river Nile from its source to mouth, or visit all the volcanoes on earth in person? I can’t, ever. So for people like me Google Earth any day!

Below is a simple how-to guide for beginners on playing pre recorded tours in Google Earth. Since there are so many tours available free to download, its a pity if we do not use them. And as I have noticed that the biggest reason people shy away from Google Earth Tours when they come across one is the lack of how-to knowledge, I hope this will prove of some assistance, Insha Allaah.

First things first, you need to have Google Earth downloaded on your system. Its free and doesn’t take too long. If you are new to Google Earth, perhaps you should start by looking at my previous post on Google Earth which gives many tutorials on getting started.

Once you have learnt the basics of navigation in Google Earth, you are ready to play and view a tour in it. There are lots of people recording tours and sharing them for free with world. You can search for Google Earth Tours or you can start with Googletouring. Choose a tour you like to view and click on download button.

If prompted for saving location (in internet explorer) choose any place on your system where you can find it easily later on. Its always a good idea to create specific folders in your documents folder.

Launch Google Earth, Click on the File menu and click open. Browse to the file of Google Earth Tour you have saved and click ok.

Once your file is open you can see it in my places folder under the search box, in a temporary folder.

Now the fun begins. Notice a small icon at the bottom right corner of My Places. Clicking it will open the controls for playing the tour just like playing any video.

You can pause the tour, have a nice look around the place, look at all the panaromia pictures available (make sure the panaromio layer is checked in the layers panel) and once you have seen all that has to be seen in a place you can resume the tour.

If you feel that the speed of navigation is making you giddy, or you want a more leisurely navigation to understand geography of the place better, you can change the speed of navigation. Click on the Tools menu in Google Earth, then click options from it. A dialogue box will open. Do the following:

You can save the tour in My places by 1) Dragging the file from Temporary folder to My places. 2)clicking the small disk icon on tour player controls. 3) when you are about to exit, Google Earth will ask you whether you want to save the files in your temporary folder in My places, click yes/save to save it in My places. Saving things in My places make them a lot easier to open. Simply click on the name of the tour/place and there you go.

Have a nice tour! and happy educating!

How-t0 Guide - Ocean Food Web

Food webs and Food chains are a very important part of Ocean Habitat study. While Food chains are pretty simple to understand, Food webs can be a bit confusing. Here is a very easy project illustrated step-by-step which gives hands on learning for Marine Food Web.

1.Start with making a list of animals you want to include. You can add the number of animals depending on the age of the child/ren involved.Its always a good idea not to have too many animals from every group to keep things simple.

2.Search for images of the animals from old magazines, or you can simple write the names of the animals on sticky notes. (Please abstain from drawing the pictures of animated objects.)

3.Take a big enough piece of card board. To include the element of fun (and mess) let the children paint it to resemble a sea.

Or you can cut and paste coloured papers instead of painting. Whatever you do don’t forget to have fun.  And don’t forget to include the sun. 4.Squeeze in some cloud study by making clouds out of cotton wool. 

5.Once the background is ready start pasting pictures of animals, or sticky notes with animal names. Discuss with your child where to put each animal. Does whales live near ocean bed? Where do they think planktons are found etc.

6.Once the animals are “settled” draw a push pin across each animal. You can cover the back of the card board with another layer of card board or foam if the ends of the pins are poking through.

7. Now you can start the real “spinning” of the web. Tie a rope around the push pin on the sun and encourage your child to think of an organism who relates to sun in a food web and how. For example sun is related to the phylo planktons and sea plants as it gives them energy to make their own food. Take one string from the sun to sea plants and another one to planktons.

8.From planktons and plants to krill and other small creatures like jelly fish, sea star etc. 

9.Carry on until all the animals have the yarn/string atleast once, some will have it over and over again like the squid etc, and a giant and complex web is formed on your board.  

10.A completed food web.