The outreach showcase describes a wide variety of projects   that use Google Earth to bring geographic context to their stories. The resulting visualizations may complement course content or spur ideas for your own projects. Examples of projects:

• Visualization of South American trade - each country is mapped to show exports to all other countries with lines, and the dollar amount is mapped the size of the circles at the end of the line.

• 
• The life and work of Henri Rousseau, the French artist.

• A guide to global environmental issues, created by Popular Science.

• A Malaria Atlas Project with over 20 years of data.

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Google has added an extension to Google Earth that allows you to use many of the features of the software on maps of the night sky. Google Sky is available in the latest version of Google Earth and includes layers that outline constellations, common objects visible to backyard astronomers, tours of the galaxy and star maps that explain the life cycle of stars.

article at The Register

introductory movie on Google Sky at Google

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Mashable.com offers a list of 13 very cool Google Map mashups, including several which could be useful in education:

WikiMapia - a wiki-like map where users can add information about a location.

Flickrvision - combines Flickr’s API with Google Maps to shows the most recently uploaded photos from around the world in real-time on a map.

HealthMap - utilizes feeds from the World Health Organization and others to provide the latest updates on diseases and outbreaks in the different regions of the world.

AP News - shows recent headlines from Associated Press on a map from where the story is datelined.

US Presidential Primaries - shows the results of polls that have been taken in each state for both parties leading up to the 2008 US Presidential Primaries.

ChicagoCrime.org - allows you to search a database of crimes reported in Chicago and see where they took place. You can filter your results by location, type of crime, district, and date, and then see details of the crime on the map.

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Here are a few links to Google events and resources you may have missed:

Google Earth Gallery
Google decides to highlight some worth GE projects on their own pages.

Google Developer Day - Conference Videos

Google held its ‘Developer Day’ on May 31, 2007 and promptly turned around and dumped 70+ videos of the event on YouTube. Lots of info on new and upcoming Google Maps and Mashup tools, etc.

www.youtube.com/GoogleDeveloperDay

Embedding KML (Google Earth files) into Google Maps:

Here’s a fun trick.

1) Go to Google Maps.

2) Instead of typing an address in, copy/paste the URL/link to the kml file in the “Search the Map” box . Here’s a URL to a KML file to play with: http://www.nature.com/nature/googleearth/avianflu1.kml

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Google Maps added a feature called ‘Street View’ which provides (nearly) 360 degree street-level photos of entire streets and neighborhoods. Only New York and San Francisco so far, though. There are a ton of blog links about this, here’s one from Wired:

Street Views -Wired News Compiler

For those that would rather have a man in a huge orange costume take them on a guided tour of the new feature, Google has just the think for you, too:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Or just watch it here:

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