Making and Taking Virtual Tours with Google Earth

Google Earth has long been a favorite tool of mine for exploring the world, seeing amazing 3D renderings of natural wonders as well as manmade structures, and of course viewing my house from space.

However, it offers much more than that! With Google Earth you and your students can take and make interactive, educational virtual tours.

With the Voyager tool you can explore hundreds of pre-made tours and activities.

With the Project tool you can create your own tours by plotting points on the globe to make a 3D geographic tour of a story, historical event, interesting locations, or any concept you are exploring in class. Each location can include additional text, images, videos, links, and more.

I recently recorded a 45-minute training video on making and taking Google Earth tours. See below to view the video, as well as access resources from the session and detailed directions. And if you or your students create a Google Earth tour, please consider sharing the product. I would love to learn from you!

Explore 37 Years of Changes with Google Earth Timelapse

Back in 2013 Google launched an awesome standalone tool called "Google Earth Timelapse" which could show you how any location on Earth has changed over the past few decades with an animation created from all of their collected satellite imagery.

Now Google has made this project even more powerful and useful by bringing it inside of Google Earth itself. Although the standalone Timelapse site still works, you can now open Google Earth and access the same content through a built-in timelapse feature. This brings the added benefit of being able to move in 3D while viewing the changing landscape from the past 37 years, making Google Earth a truly 4D experience now!

Beyond that Google has also created themed collections of timelapses in Earth, as well as over 800 prerendered timelapse videos for you to use.

Altogether these resources can help students understand better than ever the changes happening to our world including forests, water, agriculture, wildfires, mining, urban growth, and more.

See below for a short video demonstrating how to use all of this new timelapse content, as well as written directions.

Launch Tour Builder Tours in Google Earth with One Click

I have been a big fan of Google Tour Builder for a long time. It is a great tool for students to create virtual tours, including locations, images, videos, descriptions, hyperlinks, and more. These tours can be used in any subject area such as retelling the events from a novel, tracing the locations of a historical event, visiting different biomes or landforms around the world, and more.

A while back I added a blog post on how to use Tour Builder to create a tour and then open that tour in the new web version of Google Earth (see here: Create your own Lit Trips (and more) for Google Earth). As awesome as that was, there was a bit of a pain point near the end when you needed to export the Tour in a special KML format, then change some settings in Google Earth, then finally find and load the exported tour. Not a deal-breaker, but still a bit of a hassle.

Well now that process just got a whole lot easier! Thanks to a Google+ post by Michael Fricano, I learned that Tour Builder now has a simple menu option that will open your tour automatically in Google Earth. All with the click of one button!

See below for directions on how to do this, as well as a sample Tour to try it out with, and also details on an upcoming webinar where we will be diving deep into these tool.

Create your own Lit Trips (and more) for Google Earth

Recently I shared a blog post on how to use Google Lit Trips in the new web-based Google Earth. Lit Trips are a great way to put students in a story, helping them see where the events took place, and bring the story to life.

In addition to just using Lit Trips, you (and your students) can also create your own tours for Google Earth. This can be a powerful learning tool, or a way for students to collect and share what they have read. Of course, beyond just Lit Trips, students can create Google Earth tours for any subject including documenting the key locations and details in a historical battle, visiting different biomes, a tour of geometric architecture, and more.

There are lots of tools that can be used to create a Lit Trip or other Google Earth tour. Whatever tool you use, the final product will need to be a .KML or .KMZ file that will then be opened in Google Earth. In my opinion, one of the best tools for creating Lit Trips (or other tours) is Google Tour Builder.

In this blog post we will take a look at how to use Google Tour Builder to create you own Lit Trip. See below for detailed directions on the process. Also, for a 1-hour recorded webinar demonstrating this process see my post "Google Tour Builder for any Subject".

Lit Trips on Chromebooks with the New Google Earth

Google Lit Trips have been a popular learning activity for many years. With the new version of Google Earth, they are now available for Chromebooks!

If you are not familiar with them, a Lit Trip plots locations from a novel on Google Earth to create a 3D geographic tour of the story. At each location the Lit Trip can also include annotations, web links, images, videos, activities, and more, all related to that part of the story. This is a great way to put students in the story, helping them see where the events took place, and bring the story to life.

Lit Trips run in Google Earth, so unfortunately for years this has meant you could not run them on a Chromebook. Google Earth has always needed to be installed on a traditional computer, such as a Mac or PC.

However, Google has now released their new version of Earth which runs entirely inside of your Chrome web browser. This means Chromebooks can now run Google Earth, and take advantage of awesome activities such as Lit Trips.

See below for a brief video explaining how to do this, along with written directions and links.

Update: If you are interested in having you or your students create your own Lit Trips (or other tours), see my new blog post: Create your own Lit Trips (and more) for Google Earth and my 1-hour recorded webinar on "Google Tour Builder for any Subject".