Google Mapping on a Rainy Day
Well, it’s another rainy day in Austin. So I decided to work with creating a map using Google, and… to see Austin from my couch.
After listening to and seeing many uses of Google Maps, and Google Earth, at NECC, I felt like this would have some potential for our upper elementary and GT students. It is important to note, also, that many visionaries in the area of tech integration have been talking about the power of Google Maps and Google Earth for several years. After hearing this and seeing this in a variety of versions, it is finally becoming a real, meaningful tool to me. And I can think of at least 4 teachers that will jump all over this when I show it to them. (Now that I understand it well enough to work with others using it.) I have heard Hall Davidson, among others, present on the features of Google Maps and Google Earth. If the potential of this is finally dawning on me, I encourage those who have been sharing about these features to keep on spreading the good news…these ideas are taking hold in the classrooms.
I also, recently, added Google Maps Mania to my RSS feed. This site features all of the different ways people are using Google Maps.
So I have spent the afternoon discovering the wonderful features of creating custom maps using Google, discovering some small limitations, and some helpful hints.
My son has emailed me custom maps of places he plans to live when he goes to school, and places he has traveled to. This has also peaked my interest and sparked some ideas for use of these kinds of maps with our novel studies and social studies with our students.
I started by searching for some help and came across this great site by Google, called Google Maps Help.
Every feature of creating a custom map is clearly explained. Once I got the hang of it, it was easy to just type in any place, address, or landmark into the search line and have them show up marked in a map that could overlay my map by clicking the “My Map” tab once the search was done. I clicked to “My Map” and was able to place any kind of marker I wanted onto the place. I then clicked the “clear search results” link to remove all of the markers my search pulled up.
When you click on each marker, you can click edit and add text, web based photos, even YouTube and Google videos. The steps for doing this are explained on the Google Maps Help site, but it took me a few tries to get the steps figured out for photos.
When you find your photo, if it’s on Flickr, or another website, you have to get the url of that jpg. You can right click the photo and select properties. In most cases you can just highlight and copy the url that is in the property box. If there is a link for adding the photo to your del.icio.us, you can copy that and use it. But here’s what took me a few tries to get, it works best if you select Rich Text, click the graphic icon, and put the url in the window. Trying to put it in the html can be tricky.
I really loved being able to put video clips into my content. However….I discovered that when I save my map as a KML file to view using Google Earth, the videos didn’t play. If I look at the properties of the content, the html for the video is there, but it doesn’t play.
I called Google to see if I needed Google Earth Pro to get these to play, and he said the version of Google Earth I am using doesn’t make a difference in whether the video plays or not.
I’m not sure why they don’t play, but I think, if we are going to use video clips, the google map view will work. I would like to have it all work nicely and neatly, just save as a KML and have those neat video clips play as nicely as the photos show up. So I will continue to work on that, and if anybody can help me with this, I would love it.
Also, I can share my map by clicking the “link to this page” link on the top of it.
HOWEVER…that link is tremendously l-o-n-g. So I put it into tinyurl to shorten it. ( One of the many web 2.0 things my son Daniel has taught me, except he doesn’t know the term web 2.0, he just uses the internet for everything he needs to do without thinking about what it’s called)
And I have a nice, neat, short link to put on my wiki, share with others, and put here:
So, get comfortable, click this link, and see a few of the highlights of Austin, and some other little things I added: http://tinyurl.com/39ll9r
Technorati Tags: GoogleLitTrips GoogleMaps HallDavidson NECC2007 TinyUrl TechIntegration
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