Today I presented at the EdTech 2015 conference at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond. My presentation was called “End the Mapathy,” and it was all about the amazing things you can do with maps. First I focused on Google Maps. I showed how you can create your own maps which are automatically saved to your Google Drive with My Maps. Street view is now more powerful than ever with the ability to explore not only streets, but inside museums and other buildings, around famous landmarks, and even under the ocean. In Google Maps try dragging the yellow pegman to a site you are curious about and look for small colored dots to appear. If you drop pegman on any of those colored dots you can get a 360º view around that place. Explore some of the best street view spots with Google Treks. There are also several webtools that work with Google Maps like Animaps (create animated maps like this) and overlays (put historical maps on top of Google maps and adjust the transparency like this or this or this). Next, I shared some of the cool things you can do with Google Earth like creating tours of cities, the ocean, the moon, and even Mars. A new webtool to simplify the process is Google Tour Builder. Here’s a sample tour of Greece & Rome. I shared over 60 other map resources which you can find on my End the Mapathy website.
