I should shortly be heading to China again to prepare for travel with my students over the Easter break — the students seem quite exciting about the trip and during my preparations I’ll explore one or two new places that we could potentially visit to help the students understand more of the economic, cultural and historical richness of China.

I’m once again testing embedding maps in my blog posts … partly to see if it can be a useful way creating some multi-media templates that help us make more sense of our activities. This is using UMapper.com as a method of easily creating the maps. Any changes I make to this map should be reflected along the way.

Rather than manually enter the data in UMapper, I now have a database of links to my photographs, a description and longitude and latitude data (hosted on my server). This can be exported directly to the map above (you can click on the markers to see the photos and control-click or right-click on the photo to open the blog entries). Its also possible to use the ‘link’ button on the bottom left of the map above to get the URL to a new page with a larger version of the map (or click here). Once there, click the circle in the top right of the new page’s map to play the map full screen.

I can also export the same data for use in Google Earth. Open this file in Google Earth and then play the file (select it in ‘Places’ and click the play arrow beneath it) — depending on the Google Earth preferences, a fly-through should result, with a pause to open the photographs (preferences in Google Earth might need to be changed to have the photographs load, I use about 3 seconds).