Blog 06: Google Tour Builder
It has been a minute since I posted, and I am so sorry y’all!! I told Ben today on our way home from picking up our curbside groceries, “okay I need 30 minutes for no one to need me because I want to write in my blog”, because y’all I love doing this! I love getting to give people updates about COVID classes and sharing technology things with y’all.
But life update time: made it through the 1st 6 weeks, even though it felt like a year. But we did it y’all. All my class sizes have increased because more students came back face to face for our 2nd 6 weeks (students can opt in and out of virtual school each 6 weeks!). I’m up to 22 in one class, and the others are 20 and 15. Not too horrible, especially because some of my coworkers have multiple classes where seat is full simply because we just don’t have the ability to keep the classes smaller. I have less KVA classes, but still using all of our technology in the classroom! I don’t do papers, and then if I do I don’t take it up! Upload it through Canvas is my go to quote for the year. That and “COVER YOUR NOSE” yelled at a very loud volume and repeatedly because I’m the crazy person. That is then met with an eye roll which honestly. I take with pride.
I hope that my other teacher friends are finding their rhythm and flow, and seriously if you need help let me know! I am here to help!!
That all being said let’s get into my absolute favorite technology tool. It is called Google Tour Builder!
Now full disclosure, Google Tour Builder will be closing in July of 2021, BUT you can still use it until then, and any social studies teacher (or honestly ELA too!) should be using this throughout the year! It’s basically a field trip app that allows students to travel from place to place and explore around in cities, monuments, or whatever! What’s great too is you can include specific information that you want students to get! Like let’s say you’re going through Events of the American Revolution, well you can place the marker at the location of the Battle of Yorktown and include a reading, a video, images, and even a date of the event!
You could make a Google Tour over a book in an ELA class, especially if a character goes from one place to another quite frequently! In social studies it’s super easy to make a tour for students to use! Anytime you start a new unit, or a war, or even in World Cultures, you could make a Google Tour to introduce students to whatever country you are learning about that week!
You can place each location in a specific order, or however you want! You can also change the icons and the pathway color. So like for me for instance, when i make one where there are battles, the icons represent which side won that battle. So like for our Google Tour over the American Revolution, every battle the British won are red icons and every battle the Colonists won are in blue! So you can really make your tour unique, and how you want it to be!
What’s super fun too, is that Google Tour Builder works with Google Maps, so everytime you pick a location, you can place the little person and see a 3D, virtual reality, shots of the area! And if it’s a popular monument or museum, sometimes you can drop yourself inside the building! So when you’ve made a location it looks like this!
Now when students get to the Declaration of Independence, they can see where it was signed, they can see the outside building, they can actually see the inside and where the delegates signed! Not all places are like this, but you can still go exploring around the area. Like for battle locations, there are typically memorials or just big green spaces but students can still explore and see the battlefield!
It’s really fun to practice building and making different tours to just try out! I have one for the American Revolution, Civil War and then the Texas Revolution as well! You can include the information you want them to get from the tour, but also still give the opportunity to explore on their own! We learned about this website in my Masters program, and a lot of us thought it was really cool especially for those people who were going to schools where they don’t have the money or funds to take field trips!
I know our social studies team is going to be using this for our upcoming unit on the American Revolution! Super tech friendly, and I promise easy to use once you start practicing and playing around!
Like I said though y’all, Google Tour Builder is shutting down come July of 2021, but Google Earth has the same kind of thing that you can use instead! I’ll be making a blog post dedicated to Google Earth, and how to incorporate that into the classroom as well! Like I say every week, SPONSOR ME GOOGLE!
Thanks y’all! Be back soon with another post!
- Bay :-)
