GOOGLE EARTH NOW ALLOW ANYONE TO CREATE MAPS AND STORIES
A section of the Android and search giant Google Earth is being enhanced significantly. This emerged as a result of the Voyager program expansion, launched in 2017. An interface which at that point introduced a guided tour from top storytellers, scientists coupled with nonprofits such as BBC Earth, Jane Goodall, NASA, and Sesame Street. However, there are additional content creation tools that will practically allow anyone to create maps and stories for its platform.
The GE products whose tours consist of text and image combination includes Street View and 360-degree videos that will potentially introduce viewers to different geographical habitats around the earth, giving them the opportunity to explore and acquire knowledge.
It’s also evident these tools could be deployed for educational purposes being that the tools can be used by teachers to develop stories in order to bring their lessons to life and give students a close picture of places they are learning about, such as History and Geography class presentation. The tools could also be used for personal experiences, like travel inspiration and atlas navigation.
The new content creating tools from Google Earth offers potential capabilities that include the ability to select from Street View photos and 3D views of the earth when presenting your story. Users of these tools are allowed to add lines, shapes, placemarks, photos, and videos, coupled with writing text in the rich editor and not excluding the creation of title screens for fullscreen slide presentations, and more.
When this is used effectively, the emerging stories can be organized in a structured manner that could practically give users deeper insight into places via the presentation. Also to note about the tools is that it supports collaboration and the created stories could be shared with others via Google Drive integration. With this, instructors or groups of educators could come together as a team to develop geographical tours that will enhance the learning pace of their lessons.
It’s understood, those that used these creation tools at its initial stage used it to develop maps that showed the Antarctic expedition, a river under threat, and also a 3D tour of Renaissance architecture in Italy.
At the initial stage when Google launched its Voyage platform in 2017, it was figured out that Google Earth was modernized for modern web browsers, and this implies running this platform as a web app in Chrome – viewed as a push for Chromebooks in the lecture rooms, and will see it compete with Microsoft and Apple.
While at the moment, the battle between Apple and Google is heated up to an extent, however, Google’s Chromebooks are reportedly having edge over Apple’s SVP Phil Schiller based on sales, and this is because Chromebooks are cheaper.
Although its time consuming to find photos and videos that will match teachers’ slide presentation with the aid of Voyager, many professionally created tours are readily available. While the addition of Google Earth into its Google Drive sees Google with another competitive advantage for its own products.
Lastly, to access the creation tools, one can find it in the Google Earth web app, and readily accessible on mobile and tablet devices using the GE mobile app for Android and iOS.
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