Customized Google Maps for Multi-site projects

Google Maps is a staple in my arsenal of business tools. I use it for directions in the Twin Cities and out of town, looking up restaurants and stores near other locations and for discovering what buildings, parks and other places of interest look like in Street View. By far, the most useful application of Google Maps is in cross-site project planning.

I am leading the Improve Group evaluation of Performing Arts Workshop’s Artists-in-Schools program. It is implemented in five schools of the San Francisco Unified School District, with three comparison schools in the same area. Google Maps allows me to create a personal map that displays the locations of all participating schools, as well as the Performing Arts Workshop offices, the San Francisco airport, hotels, friends’ homes and other places I like to visit when in the San Francisco area.

By creating a Google account and saving my personal map, all address information for these project sites are stored for me. After creating my personal map, I can visualize the best routes to visit multiple sites in one day and easily create directions. I can use unique place marks for each type of site I am interested in. I can also see what restaurants, parks and shopping areas are near the places I will be on a site visit that I might want to check out.

To create and start using your own Google map:
1. Sign in to Google or create an account.

2. Go to the Maps page, and click on the tab My Maps. Here you will find a link to create a new map, as well as links to some popular maps that can be fun or interesting to look at.

3. Create a title for your map and click Save. Now you can start adding locations to your map. In the Search the Map text box, enter the address or business name of the place you are interested in and click Search Maps.

4. Choose Save to My Maps and select the map to which you want to add this location. Now you can edit the title and description of this location. I like to add the phone and fax numbers to the description for quick reference. You can also insert images and change the place mark to best suit your needs.

This example shows excellent use of coded place markers and site descriptions to visually study the U.S. Civil War.

In time for Halloween, this Google Map shows locations from Dracula, as well as other sites associated with the life of Bram Stoker.

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Mashup Roundup

As a former geography and current library and information science student, I have a special interest in maps and their use for displaying and generating information. I am particularly interested in how programmers and end users combine Google Maps with other programs or data sets into mashups; a mashup is a hybrid of data from more than one source or program into a new application. Google Map mashups are interactive, or customizable, thematic maps that tend to answer very specific questions (Can I really dig a hole to China? Answer at: http://map.talleye.com/bighole.php) or contain frequently updated, user-submitted content (What are random people around the world doing right now? Answer at: http://twittervision.com/) to produce a real-time map.

One of my current favorite mashups, www.mapthecandidates.com lets you track the campaign stops of all Democrat and GOP candidates, starting in July 2007, with links to related articles or videos. What I find most impressive about this site is how easy it is to use the interactivity tools to create a map that is the most interesting and relevant to the user. You can use this site to track specific candidates, to look at a particular state or region, and to look at a specific day or time-span. For example, I found that Republican candidate Mitt Romney spent my wedding anniversary campaigning at a number of events in New Hampshire, including at a house party in Salem.

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I truly enjoy creating readable, user-friendly and attractive charts for presenting data and analysis results. I like using my cartographic skills (I was a geography major) to create information-rich charts with appropriate fonts, color schemes and icons. Most often, I create bar or column charts and pie charts with single-instance data for my projects. Sometimes though, I need to show multiple types of data or a change over time and bar, column and pie charts just don’t cut it.

Unfortunately, Excel help menus (we use the 2003 version) don’t provide a lot of help in creating more complex charts or information on how to format your data to produce a desired chart. I therefore turn to external sources and websites of Excel experts. A favorite site of mine comes from a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional: http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/index.html. This site features examples of charts made from complex data and tutorials on how to create them yourself.

For the Improve Group evaluation of Performing Arts Workshop’s Artists-in-Schools program I needed to display how teachers’ responses to survey questions changed over the course of the program period. I wanted to be able to put multiple questions on the same chart, show a change over time and show change for three different respondent types. To create the chart at the end of this page, I used multiple tutorials:
• http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ColoredVerticalBand.html, which taught me how to make floating bar/column charts,
• http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/ClusterStack.html, which showed me how to cluster columns, and
• http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/ChartType.html, which showed me how to have multiple chart types for data series.

The following chart displays classroom teachers’ responses to a question on how comfortable they feel using the artistic disciplines in their regular curriculum using a 4-point scale from Very uncomfortable to Very comfortable. Teachers completed the survey twice, once at the beginning of the Artists-in-Schools program (pre-test) and again at the end of the program (post-test). The columns on this graph represent the range between the pre-test average scores and the post-test average scores; the square dots represent the average post-test scores for each artistic discipline. Each type of respondent (comparison, etc.) is color-coded consistently across all other charts made for this project. Along with a brief explanation of the data, readers can clearly see where each respondent type started out, where they ended up and how their growth compares to each other.

Once I had created a chart that was formatted and styled in a way that I liked, I saved it as a new Chart Type so that I could apply it easily to the numerous other charts I needed to create. A tutorial for this step can be found here http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/CreateCustomTypes.html.

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This edition of TechnoBabble highlights my new favorite online community – BookCrossing.com. What I love most about this community is how it exists electronically and as a part of the physical world. It also perfectly blends my passion for books and reading with my passion for geography and thinking spatially.

BookCrossing.com is both a treasure hunt and a global book swap for avid readers. It is similar to other treasure hunt communities such as Phototag.org – a disposable camera project, and WheresGeorge.com – a currency tracker. All of these sites allow participants to “release” items into the physical world, track their progress through online bulletins and catch other items.

To begin BookCrossing, you first create a simple user profile. Then select a book you own that you are no longer reading and register it on the website to receive its unique BCID number. Next you print out BookCrossing.com’s free label templates to stick on the inside or outside cover of your book; BookCrossing.com also sells limited edition art labels and “release kits” in its online store. Next, you release your book “into the wild”! Be sure to post a journal entry whenever you release or catch a book so that others can see what happens to their favorite books.

You can also track books from Crossing Zones, places where community members regularly catch and release books. The most common Crossing Zone places are coffee shops, laundromats and bus or train stations; they can be any kind of location and users can register their own. The image below shows recently released books at A Fine Grind coffee shop in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Earlier today, I caught my first BookCrossing book and will be releasing it "into the wild" very soon. Check out my journal entry at http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/4792054. Happy hunting!

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Welcome to TechnoBabble, a new bi-weekly feature on the Inside Groove blog. TechnoBabble will explore the latest innovations and new applications of softwares and electronic technology that are of interest to us at the Improve Group.

This week I want to share a feature in Outlook that we have recently implemented to help us manage our technology resources. Improve Group staff go on a lot of site visits locally, in-State and in other major cities. We have seven laptops that adequately support our staff on these site visits. However, it has been getting difficult to manage the laptops and to know who is planning on taking them out of the office, especially when there are multiple site visits in the same month or week.

To solve this problem, we created user accounts for each laptop on our Windows Small Business Server and shared their Outlook calendars with all staff. After creating each user account, I logged in as each laptop, opened their Outlook and clicked “Share My Calendar.” Then I set up each Improve Group employee with the Author Permission level; this way we can each create “appointments” to reserve any of the laptops. Lastly, each staff member clicked “Open a Shared Calendar” in their own Outlook and chose the laptops’ calendars. Now, it is easy to reserve laptops far in advance or to see how many are available for last-minute needs.

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