Smart Notebook Search Engine
While at the Teacher 2 Teacher conference, it was a pleasure to meet up with Obe Hostetter, who runs the Smartboard Revolution Ning. Obe has created a very useful search engine for finding Smart Notebook files – this used to be featured on the Smart Website but I can’t find it anymore!
You can access the Search Engine Here
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Firefox 4 and Google Body
If you were interested in running Google Body when I wrote about it a few months back, but couldn’t get it to work in your current browser then there’s some exciting news. The new version of Firefox – version 4 – was released yesterday and this version supports OpenGL which lets the Body Browser work.
If you haven’t seen Google Body, I wrote about it here. Science and PE teachers should definitely check it out! (Update – also check out Chris Betcher’s Video here.)
Download Firefox 4 now and take a look.
Google Image Slideshow
Google Image Slideshow is a simple tool allows you to easily generate and view an online image slideshow based on search results from Google Images. http://theslideshow.net/
If you are using this in the classroom – be aware there is you can’t preview the images you are going to get in the slideshow website. I’d suggest doing the same google image search first on the regular google image search page to check no unexpected images are going to turn up. You’d also be better off using the slideshow website in Advanced mode which will let you set SafeSearch to Strict before you start.
Google restricts all automated search results to a maximum of 64 results. So, there is no way to include more than 64 images in any slideshow.
If you want to save the slideshow to access later – once you have created the slideshow simply copy & paste the URL at the top of the page. You could add this hyperlink to an IWB / PowerP{oint page or add it as a bookmark.
Updated 31/1/13 – new link
Read MoreGoogle goes off-road with Street View
Google Street View has got to be one of the most amazing projects available on the internet. It still amazes me that from my home computer I can tour cities like Rome or New York and move around as if I was there. But on the whole the places you could see were only those accessible from the road, since their special camera cars could not get everywhere. Although you could take a look at the penguins in Antarctica, which was great (check out the icon on the map).
So after two years of work, Google have now unveiled a new batch of locations that have been captured on screen using a specially adapted tricycle. The trikes allow them to access areas where cars aren’t allowed, such as backstreet alleys, piers and forest trails. The first batch of images include shots from France’s Château de Chenonceaux in Civray-de-Touraine, the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin and the gardens of the San Diego Art Institute in California.
It’s these off road locations, such as Kew Gardens in London for example. that might be of interest to teachers – as it opens up more areas that can be visited for virtual field trips. Hopefully more nature reserves and other parks will be added in the future.
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What Was There – Historical Google Maps
What Was There is an interesting site that looks like an alternative to History Pin which I’ve written about in the past. History teachers in particular should take a look!
It allows visitors to upload historical photographs of an area and tag them with a location and year. These are then displayed on a Google Map.
From the Explore Photos page you can move around the world to find places you’re interested in and then view photographs of what they looked like many decades ago. You can even overlay the old photograph onto Street View to compare today’s scene with the past.
The plan is that if enough people upload enough photographs in enough places, it will weave together a photographic history of the world.
The coverage of the UK is a little thin at the moment, but like all these sites it is dependent on content being uploaded by its users. I’m sure it’ll grow into a very useful resource.
As an alternative – don’t forget to take a look at History Pin.
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Google Fractal Viewer : Julia Map
Following on from the Google Art Project, here’s another cool Google utility I hadn’t seen before. It’s called Julia Map and it’s a way of exploring Fractals in HTML5 on your computer.
Julia sets are fractals that were studied by the French mathematician Gaston Julia in the early 1920s. Fifty years later, Benoît Mandelbrot studied the set z2 − c and popularized it by generating the first computer visualisation. Generating these images requires heavy computation resources.Modern browsers have optimized JavaScript execution up to the point where it is now possible to render in a browser fractals like Julia sets almost instantly.
Julia Map uses the Google Maps API to zoom and pan into the fractals. The images are computed with HTML 5 canvas. Each image generally requires millions of floating point operations.
You can choose to view different data sets, and play with the colour palettes. Zoom in on new areas
You can also see what fractals others have created and posted on Twitter under hashtag #juliamap.
Check out the site for yourself at : http://juliamap.googlelabs.com
Read MoreThe Amazing Google Art Project
Today Google unveiled the Art Project, a unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.
Basically its Google Street view inside various art museums. You can move around the halls and explore all the artwork in detail.
Over the last 18 months Google has worked with 17 art museums including, Altes Nationalgalerie, The Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian, National Gallery (London), The Frick Collection, Gemäldegalerie, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyseen – Bornemisza, Museum Kampa, Palace of Versailles, Rijksmuseum, The State Hermitage Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, Tate, Uffizi and Van Gogh Museum.
The results of this partnership, which can be explored at www.googleartproject.com involved taking a selection of super high resolution images of famous artworks, as well as collating more than a thousand other images into one place. It also included building 360 degree tours of individual galleries using Street View ‘indoor’ technology.
With this unique project, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to learn about the history and artists behind a huge number of works, at the click of a mouse.
Each of the museums has worked in extensive collaboration with Google, providing expertise and guidance on every step of the project, from choosing which collections to feature; to advising on the best angle to capture photos; to what kind of information should accompany the artwork.
Works of art included in the project range from Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ to Chris Ofili’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’, Cezanne’s post impressionist works to Byzantine iconography. From the ceilings of Versailles to ancient Egyptian temples, a collection of Whistlers to Rembrandts all over the globe. In total, 486 artists from around the world have been included.
Here’s a video that explains more:
This is a fantastic resource for Art teachers. You could explore museums before going on school trips there. Plus explore ones you could never hope to take a trip to! A fantastic resource for any interactive whiteboard!
Visit it now at : http://www.googleartproject.com/
Read MoreGoogle Science Fair
Google is looking for the brightest, best young scientists from around the world to submit interesting, creative projects that are relevant to the world today.
To help make today’s young scientists the rock stars of tomorrow, in partnership with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is introducing the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. It’s open to students around the world who are between the ages of 13-18. All you need is access to a computer, the Internet and a web browser.
Find out more on the Google Blog here, or check out the Google Science Fair website. You have until 4th April to enter. Even if you don’t enter, there are some useful resources in the teachers area for teaching investigations.
(this post was copied across from Teaching Science)
Read MoreGoogle Body Browser
This is something I have been waiting ages to see. I love Google Earth, Google Sky, Google Moon etc. But there was nothing for a biologist like me. I remember asking on Twitter in October if there would ever be a Google Maps for the human body. And now there is. Google Body browser.
Google Body gives you a fully-explorable 3D body. You can move about, zoom in, like you can in Google Earth. And it’s fast – very responsive – at least on my home computer anyway. At the moment it wont run in every browser (see later) but hopefully that will change very soon.
The slider on the left hand side lets you reveal different body systems, such as the muscular, skeletal, digestive and nervous. You can turn labels on or off. You can choose between one global slider – or switch to having a slider for each system (the bottom icon does this)
Double click on any organ to isolate it from the rest of the body. It will stay visible while the rest of the body fades out to make it clearer to see it.
Unlike other web based body models that I have seen on, you don’t need to have Flash, Java, or other plugins installed. Google Body will run on any browser that supports the WebGL standard. At the moment this means that only developer or beta versions of FireFox and Chrome will run it right now, but expect to see WebGL will be supported by all browsers in 2011 for sure.
This will make teaching about the human body much better on an interactive whiteboard. Combine this with the desktop annotation or image capture and annotate to label organs and systems, or to just explore different organs in detail. Hopefully in the future there’ll be links to microscope or internal images, and maybe links to pages of information about each part. For now the tool is in beta, so there’s scope for more features to be added.
Thanks to Dai Barnes for the tip off on Twitter last night!
[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/daibarnes/status/15818762632560640"]
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