Telling Your Story with Tour Builder

Perhaps you have tried writing stories in Google Earth and found the program to be a bit too complicated between coding in HTML and trying to figure out how to save the folder of placemarks? Or maybe you have tried using Google Maps as your authoring tool, but it just didn't quite do enough for you? Google Tour Builder is the perfect happy medium between Maps and Earth and it can be used to share a variety of stories. Here are some examples from the public Gallery.

• The War for Independence - A story illustrating the American Revolutionary War
• Goodall, Gombe, and Google - A combination biographical story and research science 
• In an Instant: How My Life Changed - An example of using Tour Builder for a personal narrative

Tour Builder is a web-based program using the Google Earth plugin (free) that allows users to easily combine text, images, and video with a simple, intuitive interface. Since it is web-based students can start a project in one location and finish it in a different place. The one downside is that it is not Chromebook or tablet (iPad/Android) friendly, so if you would like to use it at school you will need to check out the Media Center or one of the computer labs.

Today I spent a few periods working in Jennifer Music's Leading Edge classroom. Her 7th grade students are in the midst of creating biographies for people who have been influential in their lives. As a class, we each created a biography for Rosa Parks as an example and found that Tour Builder was the ideal tool for bringing her story to life. I am excited to see what the students develop for their own tours later this week.

If you are interested in getting started with Google Tour Builder check out this short tutorial or the Tour Builder Outreach site. We'll also have a workshop on the tool tomorrow afternoon (8/26) at 3:15pm and 4:15pm in room J3 on the Main Campus. Jump in and give the tool a try. I think you will find it very intuitive and a great digital storytelling tool to add to your collection.

Joe