Tour Creator is Closing - Here Are Some Alternatives

Like thousands of other people, this week Google sent me a reminder that Tour Creator is shutting down at the end of June. I've enjoyed making virtual reality tours with it since the first day it was available. I'm disappointed that Google is shutting it down, but there's no sense crying over spilled milk so I'm turning my attention to alternatives to Tour Creator. If you're in the same boat, here's a selection of alternatives to Tour Creator to explore. 

Story Spheres

Story Spheres is a neat tool for adding audio recordings to 360 imagery. Story Spheres lets you upload short audio recordings in which you describe to viewers what they're seeing, the history of what they're seeing, and the significance of what's in the scene they're seeing. It's possible to upload multiple recordings. When you're done you can can share your Story Spheres story in a blog post, on social media, or any other place that you typically post a link. Take a look at this Story Spheres story about Uluru to get a better sense of what can be done with Story Spheres. Last year I wrote directions for how to use Story Spheres. You can read those directions here or watch my video about how to make a Story Spheres story. 

CoSpaces EDU

CoSpaces is a platform that offers students the ability to create their own small virtual worlds. Unlike the other tools in this list, CoSpaces is an animated environment. I used CoSpaces last summer and early in the fall. It's not a tool that students will use to create a VR experience in a day. Instead, students need to spend at least a few days using CoSpaces to really get the hang of building and animating their virtual worlds. 

Google Street View App

The Google Street View app for Android and iOS offers more than just a way to view interesting places around the world. The free app includes a camera function that can be used to capture 360 photospheres. When you tap the camera icon in the app it will guide you through taking a series of pictures that will be automatically stitched together to form the photosphere. The completed photosphere can be shared with others in a variety of ways including direct sharing via SMS or email, posting on social media, or by contributing to the Google Maps community. The Google Street View iOS app is available here. The Google Street View Android app is available here.

Cardboard Camera

Cardboard Camera is a free Android app offered by Google. The app lets you take a 360 panoramic image that you can share to view in Google Cardboard viewer or similar VR headset. The app will capture any sounds including your voiceover present while capturing the image. Those who use Cardboard Camera on Android can save their VR images in Google Photos where they can be cropped and edited with basic image filters. Cardboard Camera for Android is available here. Here’s a video tutorial on how to use the Cardboard Camera app. 

Unfortunately, Google hasn't updated the app at all since 2018 so I'm not sure how much longer it will be a viable option for creating VR images.

 

A Related, Confusing Note

In addition to shutting down Tour Creator, Google is shutting down Tour Builder. Tour Builder was Google's alternative method to building tours directly in Google Earth. If you used Tour Builder, you have until the end of June to export those tours as KML files that you can then move into Google Earth. I outlined that process in the video included with the written directions here. 

If you're interested in learning more about Google Earth and Google Maps, take a look at my self-paced Crash Course in Google Earth & Maps for Social Studies. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

12 Good Resources for Learning About National Parks

Tomorrow is the start of National Parks week here in the United States. So I've put together the following list of resources to help students learn about individual National Parks as well as the park system on the whole. 

A Great Book About the Origins of National Parks
Years ago I was camped on the side of a mountain overlooking a beautiful valley in Grand Teton National Park when the history teacher in me came out and I said, "Thank you, Teddy Roosevelt." Roosevelt, more than any other politician, deserves credit for the creation of the U.S. National Parks system. Those who want to read more about Roosevelt's conservation efforts would do well to pick up a copy of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. It is by no means a quick read, but it is a great read!

TED-ED Lesson on National Parks

Last fall TED-Ed published a good lesson about national parks. The lesson explains the origins of the U.S. National Parks system and concludes with explanations of the challenges facing national parks managers around the world. The lesson also explains how parks managers try to balance access and conservation while also respecting the rights of indigenous people whose land is often included with national parks. Overall, it's a very interesting lesson that could lead to a lot of good conversations with students. 

National Parks Image Archive

The National Parks Service's Digital Image Archive is an excellent place to find images of U.S. National Parks. You can search the archive by park and or subject. All of the images are free to download as they are in the public domain. The National Parks Service also offers a b-roll video gallery. The videos in the galleries are in the public domain. The b-roll video gallery can be searched by park, monument, building, or person. All of the videos can be downloaded. Some files are quite large so keep that in mind if your school has bandwidth limits and you have all of your students searching for videos at the same time.

Google Earth Nation Parks Tours and Voyages
Google Earth offers a great way for students to view national parks in the United States and beyond. Your students can explore imagery in Google Earth to learn about the topography of a national park. In a lot of cases there is Street View imagery available within national parks and UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Your students might also benefit from viewing tours within Google Earth. To locate a tour you can refine a Google search by file type to .KMZ and then launch the tours that appear in your search results.

Google Expeditions...While They Last
If you have VR headsets available to you, take a look at Google Expeditions virtual tours of the "hidden treasures" of National Parks. Unfortunately, Google Expeditions is shutting down at the end of June. 

Google Arts & Culture

National Parks collections, exhibits, and images are available in the Google Arts & Culture apps for Android and iOS. You can also view them in your web browser. Here's a collection to get you started. 

PBS Videos
Over the years PBS has produced many videos about the National Parks. You can view some of those videos in their entirety on the PBS video website. Search on the site for "national parks" and you'll have a big list of videos to view. Here's a list to get you started.

The Travel Film Archive
The Travel Film Archive is a collection of hundreds of travel films recorded between 1900 and 1970. The films were originally recorded to promote various places around the world as tourist destinations. In the archives you will find films about US National Parks, cities across the globe, and cultural events from around the world. The videos are available on The Travel Film Archive website and on YouTube.

National Parks Bingo and More Games!
Virtual National Park Bingo is a game that asks players to explore a variety of NPS webpages and external resources to complete the bingo board. One of the bingo squares requires taking a national parks virtual tour. You could do that on the NPS website or head to this Google Earth collection to tour the U.S. National Parks.

The NPS Games and Challenges collection includes games about animals and landmarks within parks, drawing and coloring pages, hands-on projects like making costumes, and virtual scavenger hunts.

The NPS games about animals are fun little guessing games in which students see a baby animal and then have to guess what it will look like when it is grown up. For example, can you tell if this is a baby mountain lion or a baby bobcat? 

The NPS Where the Park Am I? game shows you a 360 image taken within a park and you have to guess which park it was taken in. Go here and see if you can spot Acadia National Park (that's the only National Park in my state).

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

How to Quickly Duplicate and Sort Jamboard Pages

Jamboard has a lot of handy features and neat uses for in-person and online instruction. I recently outlined a bunch of them in this blog post. This afternoon someone emailed me looking for help with duplicating pages within a Jamboard. Like a lot of things, it's easier to show how to do it than it is to write how to do it. I made this short video to show how you can quickly duplicate, re-use, and sort pages or frames within a Jamboard. 

Applications for Education

Duplicating a page within a Jamboard is helpful when you want to have multiple pages that look the same but you want students to complete a different activity on each one of those pages. For example, I might want to use the same outline map of New England on three pages then one page have students label the states, on the second page have them label capitals, and on the third page label state nicknames.

Here's how to create and distribute Jamboard templates. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

How to Score Google Forms Questions That Have Multiple Correct Responses

This afternoon I answered an email from a reader who was having a little trouble with Google Forms. She was trying to create a quiz in which some of the questions had multiple correct responses for students to select. For example, "select from this list the names of the people who have walked on the moon." 

To create a question or prompt in Google Forms that has multiple correct responses you need to use "checkboxes" question type. Multiple choice will not work because Google Forms will only allow one selection. By using checkboxes you can have students make multiple selections in response to the question. 

When using the checkbox question type your students can select multiple correct responses to a prompt like, "select the names of the people who have walked on the moon." When you do that you'll find that Google Forms will not give partial credit to a student who selects one correct name and one incorrect name. Therefore, you'll need to change the settings on your Google Form to "release scores after review" instead of the default "release scores immediately" in the form settings. Then you'll have to manually score the question(s) that ask students to make multiple selections. 

In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate the process that I've outlined above for creating and scoring Google Forms questions that have multiple correct responses.  

On a related note, here are five Google Forms features every teacher should know. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

Spark Interest in Local History With These Digital Newspaper Archives

When I was a kid I did yard work for an elderly widow who had stacks of old newspapers magazines that she and her husband collected. Knowing that history was my strongest subject in school, she always had a new, old newspaper (and a glass of fruit juice) for me whenever I came over to rake leaves, shovel snow, or mow the lawn. Looking at those old newspapers always sparked my curiosity about buildings, landmarks, and people in my hometown. One of those sparks of curiosity led me to figuring out who my favorite fishing pond was named after. 

The point of sharing that little story is that looking at old newspapers can inspire students to dive into a little local history research and gain a bit of knowledge about the formation of their communities as they know them today. To that end, here are three good places for students to browse through the digital archives of old newspapers. 

Chronicling America is digitized newspaper archive hosted by the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword.

In the Google Newspaper Archive you will find hundreds of digitized copies of newspapers printed around the world. In the archive you fill find newspapers published in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In this video I provide a demonstration of how to search Google's Newspaper Archive. 

Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new search tool called Newspaper Navigator. Newspaper Navigator is an index of 1.5 million images published in newspapers between 1900 and 1963. You can search Newspaper Navigator by keyword and then narrow your results by date and or the U.S. state in which the newspaper was published. There is a highly detailed tutorial on how to use the LOC's Newspaper Navigator right on its search page. In general, the Newspaper Navigator is easy to use. That said, it's important to note that the search results are based on the tags associated with the images in the newspapers as opposed to the words on the pages themselves.

By the way, here's the story of my favorite childhood fishing pond. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.