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Three Good Ways to Create Virtual Tours

Last week on Free Technology for Teachers I wrote about creating virtual tours of the route of the Tour de France. The concepts used in making a virtual tour of the Tour de France can be applied to making virtual tours of just about any other place or collection places in the world.

Creating a virtual tour can be a great way for students to summarize and display information they’ve learned about geography, history, literature, geology, geometry, and many other subjects. Here are three good ways that students can create virtual tours. 

Virtual Reality Tours

Google’s VR Tour Creator has become my favorite mapping tool for students to use. With the VR Tour Creator students can create a VR tours of any collection of places that has Google Street View imagery. Students can also create tours of any places they have taken pictures of themselves. And no VR tour would be complete without a voiceover, so students can upload audio recordings to include in their VR tours. Watch my videos embedded below to learn how to get started using Google’s VR Tour Creator.

Narrate a Google Earth Tour

Google Earth Pro (AKA the desktop version of Google Earth) has some built-in features for creating virtual tours. Students can create narrated fly-over tours of a collection of placemarkers in Google Earth Pro. Watch my video below for a short overview of how to make a tour in Google Earth Pro.

Create a Sequence of Multimedia Map Markers

Students can use Google’s My Maps tool to create a map with placemarks for a series of places. In addition to the town and city names students can include a handful of interesting facts about each placemark. All placemarks can include pictures, text, and video. If you have never tried using Google’s My Maps, watch my video below to learn how to get started.

If you’re interested in learning more about virtual reality, check out my on-demand webinar titled Intro to AR & VR in Education.