Five Virtual Tour Creation Projects for Students
Google’s old VR Tour Creator offered a great way to create virtual tours that could be viewed in your web browser and or in the Google Expeditions app. Unfortunately, Google shuttered both the those programs last year. Fortunately, there is an alternative available in the form of Expeditions Pro which I reviewed a couple of weeks […]
How to Create Your Own Virtual Reality Tours
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about and gave a video demonstration of how to lead students on virtual reality tours with Expeditions Pro. In that video I mentioned that Expeditions Pro can also be used to create your own virtual reality tours. This morning I recorded a video about how do that. Watch […]
Take a Virtual Tour of the National Museum of Computing
98% of the press releases that are sent to me are completely worthless. Then every once in a while I get one that’s actually kind of helpful. That was the case when earlier this week I got a press release about The National Museum of Computing. The National Museum of Computing documents and celebrates the […]
How to Share Google Arts & Culture Experiences in Google Classroom
Last week Google Arts & Culture published a great online exhibit titled Walk the Great Wall. It’s a fantastic colleciton of Street View imagery and multimedia stories about the Great Wall of China. As I wrote last week, Walk the Great Wall includes detailed imagery of the bricks of the wall, short lessons about the […]
Tour the Great Wall of China – A New Google Arts & Culture Experience
After Google announced the closure of Google Expeditions earlier this year Google Arts & Culture became the place to go to find much of the virtual imagery that was available in Expeditions. The library of imagery and stories in Google Arts & Culture has steadily grown throughout the year. The latest big addition to that library […]
A Handful of Alternatives to Google Expeditions
As I mentioned on Friday, Google is shutting down Tour Creator at the end of June. They’re also shutting down Google Expeditions at the end of June. For some teachers that is the bigger loss. And while I haven’t yet found any alternatives that have the same capability as Expeditions for teachers to guide students […]
City Walks – Hear and See Cities Around the World
City Walks is a neat website that I recently learned about from Larry Ferlazzo. On City Walks you can go for a virtual walk in more than a dozen cities around the world. You can experience the cities with or without sound. You can go for virtual walks in the daytime or at night. At […]
Cincinnati Zoo Offers Daily Virtual Zoo Visits
We’re halfway through 2020. This week I’m taking some time off from the blog to work on some other projects. The rest of this week I’m going to re-run some of the most popular posts and videos of the year so far. Back in March I my sister, who lives near Cincinnati, shared a Facebook […]
Story Spheres – Create Audio Tours of Immersive Imagery
Story Spheres is a free tool for adding audio to 360 degree images that you own or have the rights to re-use (Creative Commons licensed or public domain). With Story Spheres you can add audio narration and ambient audio to your 360 images. Once you have a 360 image that you want to use, using […]
Explore the Royal Academy of Arts in Google’s Arts & Culture Apps
Google’s Arts & Culture site and corresponding apps make it possible for students of all ages to virtually explore thousands of fascinating landmarks and works of art. This morning Google announced a new collection with the Arts & Culture site. That collection features the Royal Academy of Arts. The highlight of the Royal Academy of […]
National Parks Games and Challenges – Try Virtual National Parks Bingo
I love the National Parks service that we have here in the U.S. One of the things I’m looking forward to doing with my kids when they’re a little older is to help them explore some of the places in National Parks and National Forests that I’ve enjoyed in my life. My love of the […]
The Cincinnati Zoo Launches Daily Virtual Zoo Visits
The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden is closed to the public right now and thousands (millions?) of kids are home from school right now too. That’s why the zoo has announced that they’re hosting daily “Home Safaris” beginning today at 3pm ET. These Home Safaris will be broadcast live on Facebook. Each Home Safari will […]
Three Ways to Create a Virtual Tour of the Tour de France
Every July the Tour de France winds through the countryside before arriving in Paris. Every year the course takes a different route. One of the things that I always enjoy about watching the race is seeing all of the historic places the riders pass. NBC Sports is usually pretty good about sharing some history of […]
A Fantastic Virtual Tour of the Houses of Parliament
CNN recently published a fantastic virtual tour of the Houses of Parliament or the Palace of Westminster, to be more precise. The narrated, self-guided tour lets viewers explore ten aspects of the Houses of Parliament including the House of Commons, the Robing Room, and the Members’ Lobby. Within each of the ten parts of the […]
How to Create a Virtual Tour of the Tour de France
The Tour de France starts on Saturday. Unlike in recent years, this year the race is almost entirely within France. The riders will only be outside of France once during the three week event. The complete course can be seen on the official Tour de France map. Unfortunately, the official map doesn’t provide anything more […]
How to Create a Virtual Tour That Includes Audio Narration
One of the many things that Google announced to coincide with the ISTE conference was the addition of an option to add audio to virtual reality tours created with Google’s VR Tour Creator. This is an update to the VR Tour Creator that was launched just a couple of months ago. This update lets you […]
Virtual Tours of Ancient and Modern Greece
Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Expeditions all provide good ways for students to see the sites of Greece. But if you would like your students to find a bit more detail about those sites, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens has an excellent resource for you. The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens […]
Google Street View App
The Google Street View app is available for both Android and iOS devices. This free app allows you to do some pretty amazing things that were not possible just a few years ago. Street View allows you to create 360 degree photos directly from your phone with no special equipment. You can choose to keep […]
Navigating Google Maps Using Pegman
Recently, I introduced you to Pegman, the little icon who lives in Google Maps and Google Earth and helps us explore imagery of places all over the world at street view level. The video below shows you how to use Pegman to navigate in Google Maps, including how to use it to visit museums from around […]
See California’s Redwoods in Google Street View
In an earlier post I shared the Google Expeditions virtual tours of national parks. Shortly after publishing that post I discovered Google’s latest additions to their Street View collections. The latest addition features Big Basin Redwoods State Park in California. This imagery lets viewers virtually experience some of the size and scale of California’s redwood […]
Take a Virtual Tour of Petra In Google Cardboard or In Street View
Last year Google added a virtual tour of Petra to its collection of landmarks that you can see in-depth in Google Maps Street View. This week that tour was updated for viewing in Google Cardboard VR headsets. Much of the imagery used in the tour was captured by a Street View Trekker camera. Take a […]