Earth Labs

Here's another great online resource for teaching Climate Change: Earth Labs

• Teacher Portal
• Student Portal

Global Weirding

This is nicely done: Global Weirding illustrates the impacts of Global Warming until 2100 and you can choose your future (do nothing, so something, or all hands on deck).

The PDE

This 'new' Periodic Table of Elements is the high-tech interactive version of the classic one below.

SimCity

Going back in time with the 'old' SimCity game in 2-D using Micropolis.JS or 3-D using 3D City - fun! (found on Maps Mania)

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2014/11/old-school-sim-city.html

Google Charts

Pretty cool stuff from Google - Google Charts. We all know the built-in ones that come with Google Sheets, but this goes much further and uses Javascript. Here are two examples:

• Motion Charts (the simplified version of Gapminder)
• Geochart

You just got Charted!

Quick, simple, and almost real-time: copy a weblink to a .csv file or Google Spreadsheet and Charted makes you a chart - that's all.

Thanksgiving Dinner Geography

This is a nice example of a Story Map by Esri: Where Did Your Thanksgiving Dinner Come From?

The US by Walmarts

Click here for full-screen version!
 

Frankenplace

Very fun: Frankenplace creates interactive heat maps based on geotagged Wikipedia entries, for example glacier. Somehow there is a teachable moment in all this!

Anvil on the Horizon!

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=84778&src=iotdrss

Coal and Geothermal

Here are two nice interactive infographics: How the world uses coal and Mapping Geothermal Heat Flow and Existing Plants.

Lake Effect Snow

Buffalo and much of Upstate NY got buried by on 18 November 2014. NASA put out this great satellite image (see below) and this YouTube video shows what it looked like in Buffalo as the walls of snow were coming-in off the lake.

Why do rivers curve?

Excellent explanation of river meanders and oxbow lakes by MinuteEarth:

Every Satellite Out There!

This is great: This is every active satellite orbiting earth is just what is claims it is - an infographic showing the 1,200 or so active satellites in orbit around the Earth.

Food Viz

Here are two excellent infographics/data viz related to food:

1. The World Food Clock
2. A personal journey into better food labeling

Solar Path

Simple and elegant: Solar Path
This would be even better for teaching if you could enter a latitude and longitude

Teaching Geology with iPads

Using iPads (or tablets in-general) for teaching 'outside' is nothing new and they are the perfect field data collection device. Crowdsourcing Digital Maps Using Citizen Geologists is just another example focused on collecting real geological data as part of a field course.

Another great example is Treworgy (In the Trenches, October 2013) and I have compiled more examples on my 'other' blog: Apps for Outdoor Labs and Fieldwork and Tablets for Outdoor Labs and Fieldwork.

http://woostergeologists.scotblogs.wooster.edu/

Likert-Scales

Great suggestions by Stephanie Evergreen for visualizing Likert-Scale data - typical for for what we get from online surveys.

http://stephanieevergreen.com/aggregated-stacked-bars/

Mýrdalsjökull (Iceland) 1986 to 2014

Excellent image comparison for Mýrdalsjökull (Iceland) 1986 (Landsat 5) to 2014 (Landsat 8).

I suspect we'll be seeing more of those...this is a classic case were data availability is driving science: there is nothing particular interesting about the time period between 1986 and 2014 except the mid- to late-1980s is when Landsat 5 became available.

20 September 2014

Now that's cool!

http://tabletopwhale.com/2014/08/27/42-butterflies-of-north-america.html

Into Thick Air

Into Thick Air is a fun 'spoof' on what is considered by many as the ultimate mountaineering (and financial) challenge - The Seven Summits. Now, find these seven high points of the US heartland on this map: Mountains and Hills of the United States.

Everything You Need to Know About Planet Earth

Software for Infographics

This type of compilation is hopeless, incomplete, and outdated...nevertheless...here's my compilation of Infographic Tools, Apps, and Software. Need more? How about Andy Kirk's 273 Datz Viz Resources (nicely categorized as well!). Or, Kathy Schrock's compilation of tools, links, and resources.

http://www.schrockguide.net/

import.io and infogr.am

This is interesting: you can use import.io to scrape data from web pages and then make infographic thereof in infogr.am - the video below shows an example.

Now they released a new tool called import.io Magic: simply paste a URL into the search box and Get Data.

More videos from Infogr.am.


Webinar: Data visualisation from A to Z with Infogr.am and Import.io from Infogr.am on Vimeo.

Come on Massachusetts!

Are you in Congress?

Well, not literally - but in terms of your basic demographic characteristics? Have a look at Are you reflected in the new Congress? by The Guardian.

The ACE Climate Assembly

The ACE Climate Assembly is a high school entertainment education program about climate change and sounds a bit like the Climate Reality Presentation associated with Al Gore. Still, this is a question of scale: how can you deliver the science of climate change across the country in way that is engaging and reliable?

• Request your ACE Assembly
• Flora et al. (2014): Evaluation of a national high school entertainment education program: The Alliance for Climate Education

3D Printing to Teach Physical Geography

This sounds excessive...but how about using a 3D printer as a teaching tool in a Physical Geography lab to teach and learn about topography. That would be cool, especially if we could go from a topographic cross-section to a printed 3D model in 2 hours.

• Horowitz and Schultz (2014), Printing Space: Using 3D Printing of Digital Terrain Models in Geosciences Education and Research. Journal of Geoscience Education, 62(1), 138-145.
• Here are the MakerBot Replicators (that even sounds cool!)
• Geoscience education, meet 3D printing (Laura Guertin, 5 November 2014)

Clouds and Citizen Science

This is a great example of citizen science: ground-truthing NASA satellite images for clouds.

How to make an animated GIF

This seems a little complicated, but here's how to make a seamless looped GIF in Photoshop by Tabletop Whale. Below is my own attempt at an animated GIF: the Quelccaya Ice Cap in 1998.

mugs pays once

That used to be it: you either used latitude and longitude or street addresses to define the position of something (of course there are 100s other coordinate systems as well...). But now we have what3words and Google Open Location Code!

No Comment...