KU Tech Camp

Wonderful World of Google Maps

With Google Maps, you and your students can become arm-chair explorers and  cartographers with ease. Google Maps are a fun and visual way to help students  understand geography concepts, map reading, location, and distance measurement.  Besides using Google Maps to teach the fundamentals of mapping, like latitude and  longitude, you can inspire students to investigate the world and to think spatially. You can use Google Maps with your students to: Create collaborative maps (video below) Create a campus of school map Create a family heritage map Get walking directions Plan a trip using public transportation See progress in an area using time-lapse photos (video below) Get biking directions Add or edit places on maps for your community Compare neighborhoods and communities across the world Understand traffic patterns Use maps as a writing inspiration Take virtual field trips Locate services around you Timeline - new feature just being rolled out (keeps track of where you've been) Some of the programs that use the Google Maps engine that you may want  to use with your students are: World Wonders Explore regions of the world using images, street view of maps, and GE. Create your own and save them to your gallery. Instant Street View Just type in an address and instantly see it in Google Street View. You can also select specific places of interest (Tower of Pisa) and it will take you there. You can even explore caves., or the excavated ruins at Pompei. Nightwalk in Marseille An example of what can be created using the Google map API engine. Google Treks Using Google Maps, you can tour many out of the way places - Gombe National Park (the forest home where Jane Goodall researched chimps) Khumbu, Nepal ( Himalayan homeland of the Sherpas of Everest) Pyramids of Giza Colorado River Angkor Wat (Cambodian temples) Churchhill (polar bear capital) Taj Mahal Venice Italy Galápagos Islands Eiffel Tower Mt Fiji Burj Khalifa (world’s tallest building) Iqaluit (Canadian Arctic) Everest Base Camp Grand Canyon Great Barrier Reef Amazon Basin Kennedy Space Center Story Spheres Smarty Pins an educational geographical trivia game Making a Custom Google Map Using Google Tables to Chart Data in Custom Maps This is NEW technology and considered experimental. However, it is VERY powerful. Go to research.google.com/tables to look for tables. You can use either web tables or fusion tables. You could search for hurricanes or earthquakes. Download the file you find interesting.   Open it in Excel (it should be a CSV file) OR Save it to your Google drive and open it in Sheets (must still change it to CSV) Clean up the data if necessary. Make sure each column has a unique name - many times you can just delete the top row. Make sure there are no blanks in the data Save as a CSV (comma separated value) type of file to your Google Drive This is found under the File-->Download menu. Download to your Google Drive to the folder you are working in. Open Google Maps Click in the map search box MyMaps should appear underneath it on the left and on the right side you should see a Create button. Click it and the Map engine should open in a different page. Name your map. Click the blue import link and navigate to your csv file. The file will upload to your map. If you get an error, check the following: file type must be csv column headers must be unique data point to plot to map must be something the map can use (address, state, country, etc) no blanks in data Choose the data you wish to have plotted in your map. Experiment with the data to show it in different ways. You are not limited to using just a single table, you can import multiple tables and compare the data to prove or disapprove a hypothesis. Put each import an a different layer. How to Videos Create Collaborative Maps Use Time Lapse Feature in Maps