Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Google Earth Tour Builder: Quick thoughts

I get students to build Google Earth tours for classes (see spatial stories in this post), my site Google Earth for Teachers describes how to create them using Google Earth.  However, the editing tools are basic to say the least.  People have built tools for making tours before (Snoovel, Google Earth Studio) but they've both sunk without trace.  So I was excited to find out someone else has had a go:  Google Earth Tour Builder.

I had a go at creating a tour.  It seems to be following the design of a 'stepper' as in, more like a PowerPoint presentation with slides and clicks to move on than a Movie clip so the flow through the tour is structured like ArcGIS explorer (not sure if that still exists either...).  However, beyond that, I can't really explore it.  My problems:
- No help files, screencasts, tutorials to tell me how to work it
- When I create a new place I'm told to 'drop a draggable placemark to specify a location' but I can't find anything to drag. (on OS, tried in FF and Chrome).

If I can get it to work I'll review it further.

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