Mapping my tracks and more

Categories: Geography General, Other

Back to the grind today, couldn't shake a headache which has plagued me for three days, but apart from that everything was ok. I am supposed to be looking at course outlines just now, but have been messing around with something called Fire Eagle. It basically stores information about where you are. This information can then be used by other services in response to your location (bear with me here...).

One of the things that I found out about through fire eagle is an application called Map My Tracks. If you have a mobile phone with built in GPS or a GPS receiver, it basically maps where you are in real time. So, for instance, the cycle route that I followed the other night could be tracked while I was actually cycling it and seen on the web-or if I was doing fieldwork with say, Advanced Higher, I would have an accurate map of the area we had covered and sample points we had taken. I really like the look of this and hope to play around with it througout the coming year once I resolve connection issues with my phone. One of the most appealing things about this is that you can also export your tracks to Google Earth.

Less complicated and something I could probably use frequently during class time is something called Where's The Path, which, providing you get on the site early enough, allows you to have on OS map side by side with google satelite imagery. I can imagine this would be very good for teaching map skills to newcomers to the subject or those who have difficulty interpreting OS maps. The only problem appears to be a limit on the amount of OS images used in one day, hence the reason you might need to get on the site early.

Anyway, more in-service tomorrow, I'll probably be working on updating course outlines...