Presentation 1: Google Earth

Fly over Earth – we started with the Empire State Building (3D), then flew to a Street View of the school, Stature of Liberty (3D), explored various continents, visited beautiful China mountains, Mount Everest, Volcanoes in Phillipines and came back to 3D model of Disney World in Florida

Requirement

Google Earth, Fast internet connection

Preparation

Flying with Google Earth may be quite challenging – the schenery changes way to fast, you may suddenly lose your destination point. To avoid these problems,learn to navigate – fast, slow, pan, zoom, with key strokes, since it gives you finer control. Also, plan your route carefully, by recording viewpoints that you like. Even for one destination you may need to record several view points gradually approaching the destination under preferable angles.

Once you create a list of view points there are still few challenges:

• 1. You will have to learn to pause and continue the demo that goes through the view points you defined. Make sure to learn how to skip the view points you've already been to and proceed to the next one. On several occasions my demo was reset and I would end up in a completely different place than what I expected

  2. The placemarks are marked with yellow pins by default. This is distracting to the kids. To get rid of the pins, when you create a new placemark, go to "Style, Color" tab and select opacity 0%. 

Also, once you are at the desired view point you may want to roam around, for example, to see what it's like to stand on the tallest building. There are key combinations that you will need. For every view point I recorded the key combinations in the view point name to help me figure out what to do.

As an alternative, pre-record a short video roaming around the place. You don't have to navigate real time, you can just use placemarks and pre-recorded videos.

Also, play with the sun settings. For mountains / canyons it is spectacular to see the sunrise and sunset.

Here is the list of viewpoints I've been using. (Attached is the kmz file)

• • Empire state building, roaming around it

  • Statue of Liberty

  • Brooklyn

  • School

  • School street view

  • Las Vegas

  • Las Vegas - Eifel Tower

  • Paris - Eifel Tower

  • Grand Canyon

  • Sunrise and sunset in Grand canyon

  • China mountains

  • Mount Everest

  • Tokio

  • Disney World, Florida

Presentation

Make sure to turn off all visual displays that you are not going to need. Once you are done with 3D buildings and Street View, turn them off for faster loading

Besides flying from a view point to the next one there are a lot of you can talk about along the way. Here are some suggestions:

• 1. How the images were taking, talk about satellites

  2. Name continents, countries, oceans

  3. North, South, West, East

  4. Street View – cars going on every streets and taking pictures

  5. Tallest buildings, city history

  6. Tallest mountains, longest rivers, largest lakes, driest deserts

There is also an option to see the lights depending on the time of the day. I haven't personally tried it during presentation but it may be cool to see what the place looks like during early morning, evening, night

Tips:

When kids saw the street view they started asking me to fly to their home. You may want to ask a few addresses in advance to fly kids to their homes

Some kids were frustrated that there were not volcuano eruption. You may want to try to fill in animations with YouTube videos