Top Technorati listed blog Engadget highlights Tour Builder, a new tool created by Google and released on Veteran's Day. Tour Builder leans on the visual power of Google Earth to allow users to build and share stories, whether personal in nature or any story worth the share and enhanced by showing its geographic slant.
Google has highlighted their new tool on the Lat/Long Blog today, featuring Bobby Lake, a History teacher and Football coach at New Jersey's North Plainfield High School. Lake strives to make his teach-enhanced lessons interesting and meaningful, and has beta tested Tour Builder in his classroom.
Google Certified Teachers have long been familiar with the concept of using online tools to bring alive stories shared in the classroom. Google Lit Trips is a unique site that has allowed its users to drop pins on customized Google Maps, adding text, hyperlinks, YouTube embeds and images. Finished files are then shared by downloading Keyhole Markup Language, or KML files, specially formatted to plug into and overlay on Google Earth to display a clickable story.
Since Google Map's recent update, however, the "My Maps" feature allowing the creation of customized map tours that easily translate to literature- or story-based virtual trips appeared to vanish, causing a bit of consternation among users trying to locate them.
With Tour Builder, however, the customized maps feature is front and center, albeit in a separate interface outside of the Maps and Earth tools. Perhaps this was to encourage sharing customized map experiences with others. Google Tour Builder's unique three-column interface also provides a permanent address for one's shared story, removing the need to export and import unwieldy KML files to enjoy a virtual tour - again a win towards facilitating sharing.
Continued on the next page
via Technology articles at Technorati http://feeds09.technorati.com/~r/tr-technology/~3/OFkP4r5tL_o/