Google Earth Directions For Clean Watersheds

Google Earth Directions for the Clean Watershed Project Logging into Google Earth

1. Double click on the icon with your cursor to launch the software. There should be an icon on your desktop. If you do not have an icon, please inform the instructor.

Moving Around In Google Earth

2.

The software offers a navigation tool in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. This tool will help you to zoom in or out, change your direction, or tilt your perspective.

3. The top compass lets you change your perspective from overhead to a position along side of it. 4. The bottom compass spins the Earth North, South, East and West. 5. The slide bar beneath the compass lets you zoom in and out. Spend some time zooming in and out. 6. Use your mouse to move around. Try to center your location on the Southeastern United States. When you get there, zoom in on Marietta. Can you see the outline of the city?

Finding Places in Google Earth 7. In the upper left-hand corner, type in your address, and then click on the magnifying glass. The program will zoom in on the location of the address you entered. Any place with a physical street address can be found this way. 8. You can also find places of interest such as National Parks or monuments by typing in its name. Type in “Statue of Liberty” and click on the magnifying glass to zoom in on that location. 9. Besides address and places of interest, you can find the exact location your field research area. To do this type in the latitude and longitude of those coordinates. If you don’t know them see your instructor.

Creating a Folder to Store Your Placemark(s) 10. The Clean Watersheds project’s goal is to create a composite layer of various schools water quality data so the students can look at broad themes related to water quality and usage. Therefore it is important to keep each schools’ data separated into folders that can easily be added to our composite layer. 11. To create a folder to store your placemarks, move your mouse over the “My Places” icon in the places panel and then right-click with your mouse. 12. Choose “Add” from the menu and then move your mouse toward the arrow for the pop-out window. 13. Choose the “Folder” option. 14. Give the Folder a title and also include your name (for example – Nose Creek – Thomas). This will help the teacher know which placemark belongs to which student. 15. If you are a school with many test sites, or many placemarks, name your folder with the name of your school and the semester (for example – The Walker School Spring 2009).

Creating a Placemark 16. Click on the yellow push pin in the tool bar at the top of your screen. A yellow push pin will appear along with a dialog box where we will be entering information later. 17. Click and drag the push pin to the location you want. If you can’t see it directly, you can use the navigation tools to move around or the zoom tool to zoom in or out until you are at your test site. 18. Type in a title for your placemark, such as “Nose Creek Spring 2009” and click OK. 19. You should now see your placemark. If it’s not in the right location and you want to move it, right click on the yellow push pin and choose “Properties” from the menu. Once the dialog box is open you can use your mouse to move the placemark to where you want it.

Adding the Clean Watersheds Template to Your Placemark 20. Open a web browser, such as Internet Explorer and type in the address for the Clean Watersheds Project in the address bar of your browser: http://cleanwatersheds.wikispaces.com 21. On the right-hand side of your screen under “Resources”, click on the “Documents” page link. 22. Scroll down and look for the “Placemark Template Code.docx” file and double click on it to open it. 23. If it asks you if you want to save it or open it, choose “Open with” and choose Microsoft Word from the drop down list. Then click OK. 24. Once the file opens, copy and paste the code from the Word document into the place mark. You can select all of the text by going to the “Home” tab and then on the right choosing “Select” and then “Select All”. 25. Click OK to save the template to your icon. 26. Double click on the icon to see what the template looks like. There is a banner which ties together each placemark and gives them a common appearance. There is also a place for you to write about your project, add the results of your data and also to add an image. The image could be of you or a friend taking a water quality test, or you could place an image of a graph in the picture place holder.

Changing the Placeholder Text in the Template 27. If you navigated away from the “Documents” page of the Clean Watersheds project return to that page by clicking on the “Documents” link on the left-side of the wikispace. 28. On the documents page, scroll down and open the file “Clean Watersheds Placemark Template Guide.pdf”. 29. As with opening the file in the last section, if it asks you if you want to save it or open it, choose “Open with” and choose Microsoft Word from the drop down menu. Then click OK. 30. When the file opens, take a couple of minutes to review it. This document explains some of the code and shows you where to substitute your text with the placeholder text. Items on the right in the boxes explain some of the basic XHTML code and give you directions on what to do. Arrows point from the boxes to the text where you should substitute your information. A section of this document is shown to the right. 31. If you have any questions about where to place your text, you should ask your instructor. 32. We will be editing each sections and then saving it. Once you have replaced the text for a section, click OK on the placemark.

Adding Images to a Placemark 33. To reference an image in your placemark it must already be stored on the Internet somewhere. You can upload images to photosharing sites such as Flickr (http://www.flicrk.com) or Photobucket (http://www.photobucket.com). If you have a project wiki from another site, such as the Walker Water project wiki (http://walkerwaterworld.pbwiki.com/) you can also upload your images there. Ask your teacher where the images from your test site are stored online. 34. If your image is already online somewhere, open an Internet browser and navigate to where the image is stored online. 35. Once there, right click on the image, then choose “Properties” from the menu. Highlight the Location code and copy it either by right clicking and choosing copy for from the Edit menu. Make sure to get the entire code. It should end in .jpg. 36. If you closed the placemark from the previous section, open it by right clicking on the icon and choosing “Properties” from the menu. 37. Scroll down to near the bottom of the code and look for the highlighted text shown here to the right.

is XHTML code that stands for image source. 38. Replace the text between the quotation marks (“) that ends with .jpg with the location code for your image. Don’t worry about trying to adjust the size of your image so it will fit in the placemark. The template has been programmed to adjust your picture to the appropriate size. 39. Click OK to close the placemark. 40. Open your placemark to see if the image is there.

Downloading and Installing the Custom Icon 41. If you navigated away from the “Documents” page of the Clean Watersheds project return to that page by clicking on the “Documents” link on the left-side of the wikispace. 42. Scroll down the page and look for the custom icon as shown to the right. Right click on this icon and choose “Save Image As” from the menu. 43. Save the icon to your folder on the school network. Your teacher can show you how to do this. 44. If you closed your placemark from the previous exercise, right click on it to open the properties dialog box. 45. Click on the icon selector in the upper right corner of the placemark dialog box. Google Earth gives you a number of built in icons to choose from. In this exercise we are going to add a custom icon, though. 46. At the bottom of the icon selector, click on “Add Custom Icon”. 47. Click “Browse” and navigate to where you stored the custom icon for the Clean Watersheds project. 48. Select the icon and click “Open”. 49. Click OK to upload the custom icon to Google Earth.

Saving Your Information to Your Computer 50. The placemarks you create are stored on your computer and not on Google’s server. It is therefore necessary to save the placemarks you create to your folder on the schools’ network. 51. Before we save our placemark (or layer), make sure that any placemarks you created are in the folder. If they are not, then click on them and drag them into the folder you created earlier. 52. Collapse the folder by clicking on the + sign next to the folder. 53. Make sure there is a “Check Mark” in the box next to the folder. This means that all objects in the folder have been selected. If there is not, then click on the box to the left of the folder until a check mark appears. NOTE: This is the most common way students loose their information. 54. Click on the folder to highlight it. 55. In the File menu, choose “Save” and then “Save Place As”. Because your placemark(s) are in a folder the program considers the folder to be one object. 56. Navigate to your folder on the school network by clicking on “Browse Folders”. Then click “Save”.