We've been busy, so have missed mentioning some interesting posts on the GIS Education Community Blog about ArcGIS Explorer. So let's catch up...

George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, published a series of Where's Geo? entries, covering his travels throughout the U.K. His third installment looked at UNESCO World Heritage Sites using lat/lon data from a text file and also finding a KML file of the sites.

If you've been using KML or KMZ in the latest release of Explorer (480), you've probably noticed the KML improvements and enhancements (which now include support for time series). The new features are discussed in the Working with KML or KMZ data Help topic.

Joseph Kerski used a GPS from his plane to create a track of his flight across the US in his post on Mapping An Airline Route.

Joseph used a utility to convert his waypoints to a shapefile for use in Explorer, but with the latest Explorer 480 he could have imported the GPX file from his Garmin directly. See the Importing GPS data files Help topic for more information.

Joseph also heads to the Crossroads of the World, traveling to Istanbul and using Explorer for an historical overview. Joseph uses Go to Location and the Pinkerton 1812 layer found under contents on the Explorer Resource Center.

And finally, George Dailey cruises the new ArcGIS Explorer 480 with Captain James Cook, checking out the newly added graticule and also the GeoNames Search.

More information about the graticule, reference grids, and other options can be found under Setting application options in the Explorer Help. And the GeoNames Search task can be found with others on the Explorer Resource Center.