Final Results with Google Earth

My final push with Google Earth was pretty successful.  The Placemarks became very customized and an assortment of links helped the History Trip become a reference for the students that I originally envisioned.  The one aspect of the trip that changed was the "trip" aspect of it.  Experimenting three different ways of creating a tour, I did not feel that it was the best way to present the information.

1) Creating a path that the tour can follow is a great idea for a localized area.  However, as my Civil Rights trip took place all over the country, actually creating a path throughout the whole country was very time consuming, with the end result being difficult to navigate.

2) Recording the tour and manually going through the different Placemarks that I had created.  This was a good option if you were looking to just show landmarks, but as I had taken the time to integrate a number of links I did not want their to be a time limit on how much the students could stay at one location.  On top of that, I could not anticipate how quickly the students could read the text, another drawback of limiting the time at each location.

3) The final option is the simple self guided tour, which although is the most simple, really made the most sense for what I was looking to achieve.  I simply organized my Placemarks by dates, then changed each marker in ascending order through the alphabet to make it easier to recognize the order of the events.  This allows the students to go through each location at their own pace, or skip to a desired landmark if they need information on that particular event.

Additionally I began to experiment with embedding HTML buttons to the bottom of the posts in order to link my Placemarks that way.  However, I could not solve an issue that I was having with Google Earth, where each Placemark was not assigned a unique ID, a critical part of the HTML code.  Still looking for solutions on that one, and by the time I use this in class I am hoping to have that problem fixed.  All in all, turned into something pretty fun!