Create Google Maps Walking Tours!

I was recently trying to think of a new way to have students demonstrate their learning about a U.S. state they have been researching. They had used multiple websites to gather geographical information about the state, and I wanted them to utilize that information in a map-based activity.

Last week, I was listening to an episode of the Google Teacher Tribe Podcast called "App Smashing with G Suite." In this episode, Matt Miller (@jmattmiller) explained how to use Google Maps Street View and Screencastify (screencastify.com) to create virtual walking tours. I immediately started thinking about how I could use this activity to reach our learning goals for this unit.

In the show notes for the podcast, Matt Miller included a link to a blog post he had written about this activity. It included an extremely helpful tutorial video about how to use the street view tool in Google Maps.

I prepared a lesson for students to try creating their own virtual walking tour. Because I have never done this activity with students before, I tried to keep it simple and give them some useful resources and guidelines to get started. However, I think it's likely that some questions and challenges may arise as students start trying to create their videos, and so I may go back and add some more to the directions.

Here are the directions students received today:

I am super excited to see what students create! This activity is part of a larger project they are creating in Book Creator. We will be adding these virtual walking tours to the books they are creating to demonstrate their learning about the state.

Have you had your students create virtual walking tours? I would love to hear about your experience!

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