eCROP Blog

Most real problems have a geographic factor. Google Earth is a superb application for educators and problem solvers, one that is constantly improving. One problem has been the display of fuzzy to high quality images from satellite images that might be up to several years old, depending on whether you were rural or in a fast growing high population area. The San Francisco bridge image on the left is an example of the high quality to which Google is soon switching (click image for larger photo) for all its images. The company GeoEye launches the GeoEye-1 on Sept 4, 2008, just days away. According to Google's Hurowitz, it "has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation." At highest quality, a twenty-two inch (.41 meter) area in black and white or 1.65 meters in color will make up 1 pixel. In one click it can capture great quality of an area the size of the state...

The number and quality of the applications available on the Web continues to grow. In fact, applications that don't have an online equivalent are increasingly hard to find. Some of the most notable of these new Web 2.0 applications that I'm exploring add to the text tools of the digital literacy palette (on left). They include the database applications of  Blist (database with spreadsheet features) and LazyBase . Of further interest are the Spreadsheet applications within Google Docs, and  EditGrid . However, these are just some of the highlights of hundreds of Web 2.0 applications that are categorized on the Evoke-Problem Solving page .