TM-GE

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**I am providing you with SEVERAL tutorials. The first one is BASIC; the second one is the one you will want to follow. If I were you, I would read through this page completely BEFORE I started. That way, you get a gist of things before you delve into the application.** TUTORIAL ONE:

I would like to be a world traveler! I want to go to all the exciting places of the world and meet the 7 billion humans that call this earth "home." But alas...that scourge known as //work// keeps me anchored here and doesn't provide enough money to participate in my favorite hobby.

With the release of [|Google Earth], my love for geography was the imputus of my spending a lot o time "flying around" to see all that I could not go experience.

What if students could take these tours of wonderous places? There is an excellent feature in GE where you can create a list of placemarks, and save them to a file. The [|.kmz file] stores enough for you to save this list, and send them to anyone else who is also running GE. They load this file, loading a list of placemarks, and can replay a tour, flying around the virtual globe. This is "GoogleTouring".


 * How?** (From GT Touring.com)

This quick tutorial explains how you can create a Google Tour yourself, and hopefully upload it here. :) As an example, we will create a tour of the capital cities of my country, Australia.


 * You will need**
 * One copy of [|Google Earth]
 * An idea for a tour
 * A quick skim through the hints [|GoogleEarth Tour Tips.doc]
 * What to do**

1. Browse to the first placemark of your location in GE. I generally like to start with an overview of the area (if suitable):

2. G o to //Add -> Placemark// or just press //Ctrl N// to create the first placemark. A window will appear.

3. While this window is open, adjust the properties of the placemark with one or more of the following methods:
 * 1) Use the mouse to move the placemark around on the map.
 * 2) Click on the icon inside the **Name** box to change this icon.
 * 3) Click on the **Advanced** box to change more properties:
 * 4) Label and icon properties in the **Style** tab
 * 5) Exact positioning in the **Location** tab
 * 6) Viewpoint, in the **View** tab

4. Give the placemark a name, and add a GOOD, lengthy description (unlike this!):

5. Create a new folder for the tour, by clicking on **My Places** then on **New Folder**. Type **Australian Capitals** in the **New Folder** window and click **Ok**. The window will look like this: 6. Click on **Ok** and you will have your first placemark in your tour:



7. Browse to the next location in your tour, in this case Sydney:



8. Repeat steps 2, 3 and 4 above to set the name and description of this placemark.

9. Expand **My Places** in the Folder view, either by clicking that folder or the little arrow next to it, then click on the **Australian Capitals** folder. After this, click **OK**and your second placemark is saved to this folder also:

10. You now have two locations in your tour. Note that GE will put your placemarks in the folder in reverse order, so you might need to re-arrange them by dragging them around.



11. Repeat steps 2 to 9 for all of your placemarks on your tour. Eventually you will have a complete list of locations for your tour.

12. Try out your tour by clicking on the top level folder in the list (in this case, **Australian Capitals**), then clicking the play icon at the bottom of the list. Your tour is complete!

13. Your tour will be saved under the **My Places** folder for you automatically. However, if you'd like to save this tour separately so you can send it to someone or upload it, you should save it to a separate file. Just right-click the top level folder (here it's the **Australian Capitals** folder), then select **Save As...**. You can then save the tour like any regular file and send it or upload it to your wiki.



Sometimes during an auto-guided tour, the image might not render before it moves on and simply shows as a blur. This problem is caused by the time it takes to get images from the GE servers. In this case, you should click on the locations manually then once loaded you can start the tour again. GE does not yet allow the tour speed to be set within the .kmz file, so be patient for now. Hopefully the Google guys add this in soon.
 * Important note**

TUTORIAL NUMBER 2

From **Steve Kluge** - //Fox Lane HS, Bedford, NY and Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY//

As with all good field trips, careful planning is necessary, and the virtual Google Earth TM tour is no different. When developing a lesson in Google Earth TM, consider developing a list (mentally or written) of the desired locations for the tour placemarks, and imagine that students will eventually use the tour of placemarks as a virtual field trip. This field trip will include several stops that have some geologic/geographic significance.
 * 1. Organizing Your Lesson**

Think, too, about how and where you want to link your classroom lesson into your GE tour. It might consist of an activity at each stop with instructions to students embedded right in the placemark. Or, the lesson may be a Word or .pdf document linked from the placemark, as is the case in the sample Giant Peak tour (See the [|Image and File Hosting] section below). You will find this helpful as you organize your thoughts and materials. Once you complete your planning, you are ready to move into GE and start building your tour! Use this planning tool!

2. **Creating a Google Earth TM Lesson**

Creating and Saving Folders and Placemarks


2. Click on "My Places" in the places frame to select that destination for the new folder.

3. From the toolbar, click "Add" and then "Folder" as indicated above. The "New" folder dialog box will open as shown to the right above. Type in a name for your folder. Then type in a description of the contents of the folder. The image above is a screen shot of the folder that contains the sample tour and lesson that accompanies this manual. Generally, you will want the "Allow this folder to be expanded" box checked, and the "Show contents as options" box unchecked. When you press "OK", the folder will be created and saved in "My Places". See also Moving Folders and Editing Folders

Individual placemarks can be added to the folder you've just created. The steps for creating a placemark are similar to those required to make a folder: 1. Navigate to the exact view you want your audience to see when they view the placemark. 2. In the Places frame, click on the folder you want to create your placemark in. 3. From the toolbar, click "Add" and then "Placemark" as indicated in the figure to the right.
 * Creating a Placemark**

4. In the dialog box that opens, type in the name and description of your placemark (this is the text that will appear when your placemark is displayed in GE). The image to the left was made as the "Glacial Landforms in the Adirondacks" placemark was made. The default placemark icon is, and it is easily changed by clicking the icon in the New placemark dialog box. For the Giant Mountain folder, we've chosen the icon. Once you've selected an alternate icon, all subsequent placemarks will default to the alternate. The Latitude, Longitude, and View are all set automatically to match the display you set as you began to make your placemark. You can play with the Style,Color and Altitude settings, but the defaults will work fine.See also Moving Placemarks and Editing Placemarks **Ordering Placemarks in a Tour** When creating and adding placemarks to a tour folder, each successive placemark will be added to the //**top of**// selected folder in the Places frame. Tours play in order from the top down. Creating placemarks in your folder in a logical sequence will create a 'backwards' tour (i.e. the first location created will be the last 'stop' on the tour). Tour placemarks can be rearranged by clicking and dragging each stop into its appropriate position in the tour list (See also Moving Placemarks). One suggestion to aid with the re-arrangement of the tour is to number the stops sequentially. When re-ordering the placemarks, 'stop' number 1 should be at the top of the tour folder, and stops should continue in numerical order. Notice that a number of the stops in the sample Giant Peak tour are numbered. Remember, placemarks can be edited at any time.

Once you have created folders and placemarks in my Places, GE will save them there. But if you want to bring your GE tours to another computer, send them to a friend, or post post them to the web, you will have to save them as separate .kml or .kmz files. To save a folder or placemark, simply right click the folder/placemark you wish to save, and select "save as" as indicated in the image to the right. Select or create and select a folder on your hard drive to hold your GE files. You can save your files in either .kml (Keyhole Markup Language file) or .kmz (Keyhole Markup Zip file)format. It makes sense to save folders containing several placemarks as .kmz files. When you click a .kml or .kmz file in My Computer, it will automatically open with Google Earth TM.
 * Saving and Sharing Folders and Placemarks**



Images and Hyperlinks in Placemarks
Putting images and hyperlinks neatly into placemarks requires the knowledge of just a little HTML. But **don't worry**, it's not that hard, and what you need to know is very limited. In this section, you'll learn the basic HTML tags you'll use, and if all else fails, how to "steal" the necessary code from existing placemark descriptions.

The image and information link in the placemark below were found through a simple Google search for "Giant of the Valley". Using a few HTML tags, it was easy to display the image and link to the site within the placemark description. The "How To" follows.

This placemark............................................................................was generated by this description.

All instructions, or tags, in HTML are enclosed by brackets. For instance, typing  into a placemark description will center all the content - images and text - that follows. A particular instruction can be turned off by placing / within the brackets, before the instruction.  will turn off centering, and all content that follows will default to the left margin. The table to the left below contains all the HTML you need to make a good looking and functional placemark.

In this table the HTML is black, and annotations are in red. Google Earth TM supports other HTML in descriptions, too. If you know a little HTML, you can change fonts and create tables to display images and/or text side by side, but that is beyond the scope of this manual.

The image below, also annotated in red, is the description that produced the "View from the Summit" placemark in the accompanying GE tour.

You're quite likely to want to include images you've found on the internet, but the image size may be too large to fit your placemark they way you's like. The remedy is quite simple, and just involves adding width and height specifications to the  tag. Follow these steps to resize an image in your placemark: # Right click the image you're interested in and select "properties". Jot down the image size on a piece of scrap paper. >  To reduce an image whose original size is 900 by 387 pixels, for instance,use this IMG SRC tag: 
 * Re-sizing Images from the Internet**
 * 1) Multiply both the width and height measurements by the same reduction factor (0.5 will produce an image 1/4 the size of the original), and jot down those new dimensions.
 * 2) Edit your  tag by adding width and height specs as follows:

Rather than linking to someone else's images, you may want to use your own. While images that you own can be attached to a .kmz file, the image will greatly increase the size of the file and increase file download times as well. Furthermore, we have experienced some trouble getting images to reliably travel with a GE file. For those reasons, we recommend hosting your images at one of the sites listed in the [|Image Hosting] section of this manual. Instructions for uploading your images are at those sites, and generally you will have to open a free account to do so. Once your picture is up on the host site, you can retrieve its URL by right clicking the image and selecting "properties". You can cut the URL from the properties window that opens and paste it between the " " in the  tag in your placemark description.
 * Using Your Own Images**

It is quite likely, however, that your images will be the wrong size to fit your placemark. You can resize the images right in your placemark (see the [|resize] section above). Alternatively, you can download and install [|**Easy Thumbs**], a free and easy to use image resizing and editing tool (other options are listed in the [|Imaging Processing] section of this manual).

Generally, images will need to be no larger than 450 pixels wide or high, and since they will be viewed on screen, jpg quality can be set to 70% with no significant degradation of appearance.

http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/ug_editing.html
 * Editing**

Another excellent "how" http://www.geosociety.org/educate/LessonPlans/creatingGoogleEarthTours.pdf


 * Hints for making a tour**

While you're busy making a tour, here are a few hints and tips to help you create an informative and smooth tour:
 * 1) Try to order your placemarks in such a way as to make the tour self-playing. They should be in linear order so that the view moves from one to the next, rather than jumping all over the area.
 * 2) Use appropriate icons for each placemark. For parks, ue the tree icon and for churches, use the church icon. This gives your audience an immediate clue as to what the placemark is.
 * 3) Fill in a brief summary of the placemark in the description box. You might know what "the roundhouse" is, but your audience might not.
 * 4) The description box for each placemark accepts HTML - take advantage of that.
 * 5) If possible, include a link to a page with more information.
 * 6) If your tour has a very large number of placemarks, consider grouping them in categories with their own sub-folder. Right-click on your tour folder in the Places pane and select "New...Folder".
 * 7) Google Earth lets you zoom, pan and tilt the viewpoint - the view for each placemark should take advantage of that and show the location as best as possible. If you find a better view for a placemark, right click it and select//Snapshot viewpoint//.

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