I’ve neglected this blog for quite a while now, so with a break from the day-to-day demands of teaching I thought it was about time to post.
Today I’ve been out with my Year 12 Geography students completing some urban fieldwork in relation to Unit 2 of the AQA AS Geography exam that they will sit in the summer. We were aiming to compare environment and housing quality in two contrasting inner city areas (Everton and Princes Park) and a suburban area (Woolton) in Liverpool. We decided to compare two inner city wards due to the results of the data that we collected from the census 2001 website. The results threw up some interesting discoveries in terms of ethnicity, employment and education when comparing the two wards.
During the day students were required to complete environmental and housing quality surveys within the three wards. Whilst completing these surveys, I thought today would be a good idea to track our journey using the Trailguru application for my iPhone. I hoped to track our whole journey, plus collect geotagged photographs that would hopefully show how housing changed as we moved away from the CBD of Liverpool. Kenny O’Donnell had completed a similar activity recently using Everytrail, and after the results from today I may go back across our route and use Everytrail as today’s results were not as good as I had hoped.
You can view my trail of the Trailguru website, and some of the results are quite interesting and useful, but unfortunately only parts of my trail have been saved and only seven of the photographs that I took have been uploaded to the site. Whether this is a problem with the site or an issue with me using my phone I’m not too sure?
The image to the left indicates my trail from today. The majority of the trail has been picked up and the first seven photographs that I took are accurately geotagged. Unfortunately the trail did seem to be cut off when travelling from Princes Park to Woolton. In addition to this, all of the photographs that I took in Princes Park and Woolton have not been posted to the site.
The trails can also be viewed in Google Earth and this can be viewed below.
The elevation profile indicates how land height changes across my trail. This clearly shows as we moved away from the CBD of Liverpool, our elevation increases. Exactly what we expected.
The potential for this software is clearly there to see. Hopefully over this week I will re-visit the three wards that we visited today and upload a new trail with geotagged photographs to support the data that we collected.
Hi John,
I have been using everytrail with a phone it wasn’t really designed for, which has created some minor problems. The trails themselves have been near perfect, but I have had some difficulties with photos too. Fortunately, flickr allows batch imports and the photos can then be placed automatically by their GPS. One problem with this occurs if the fieldwork area is small, as the location tagged to my photos was not 100% accurate (although it wasn’t terrible either). Of course, your experience might be totally different as its an phone app, whereas I am using it on a blackberry storm when according to the company, it’s designed for the curve. Noel Jenkins posted on phone use of this a while back, and apart from these minor gripes, I’ve been really happy with everything else about everytrail, which also has a layer in GE. Will be keen to see how you get on with it