Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Two Cool Mapping Tools in the Felt Mapping Platform

A couple of weeks ago I published an introductory overview of a new digital mapping platform called Felt. As I said in that introduction, I've only begun to scratch the surface of all of the things that students can do and make on Felt. One of those things is the ability to quickly and easily map walking, running, and biking routes. Those routes can be displayed in a variety of colors on the map. Another neat feature is the option to overlay any image onto the map. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Felt to create a map of a bicycling route. In the video I also demonstrate how to overlay an image onto a map



Applications for Education
Creating a map of walking or bicycling routes can be a good way for students to familiarize themselves with their communities. It's also a good way for physical education teachers to map short routes for their classes.

Image overlays are helpful when you have an image of an old map or an image of how a place used to look. Overlay the image on its corresponding location to show students a "then and now" perspective.

On a related note, my Google Earth & Maps course is 50% off for the rest of the month use the code GEOAWARENESS22 during registration.

How to Search Within Your Google Drive Folders

Yesterday afternoon I shared a tip for keeping track of what you put into your Google Drive folders. This morning I have a tip on how to find the things that you and or your collaborators put into your Google Drive folders. 

Google Drive has contained a search function almost since its launch more than ten years ago. That search function is fairly obvious. A less obvious search feature that sometimes gets overlooked is the ability to search within a specific folder in your Google Drive account. 

To search within a specific folder in Google Drive simply right-click on its title to make a new menu appear. Near the bottom of that menu you'll find an option to search within the folder. Selecting that option will open a menu of search functions that are specific to that folder. Those functions include searching by file type, date, and file owner. 

Watch this short video to learn how to search within a Google Drive folder




The ability to search within a Google Drive folder can be particularly helpful when you are looking for files within a large shared folder. You might use a slightly different naming convention than your colleagues or students so being able to search by date, file type, keyword, and file owner can be a huge time and frustration-saver.