Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Google Maps”.
This video is the beginner’s guide to using Google Maps and, if you haven’t used this before, really it shouldn’t be intimidating at all for you to use it, it’s really a nice helpful tool and it’s pretty easy to use. So, let’s take a look. First off you want to go to maps.google.com and that gets you to the service Google Maps. Next, just do a search in the upper left for the place that you’re interested in so I’d like to know more about Clarksville Tennessee. So I’m just gon na do a search for Clarksville, comma TN and it’s gon na zoom in on Clarksville, and you can see it gives me a little image here on the left.
That gives me a view of some part of Clarksville. Now, if I want to, I can use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in a little bit on any particular area here of Clarksville. I can also double-click anything that you double-click on will get zoomed in on. So those are some things that you need to know to zoom in and hone in on the part that you’re interested in now you’ll notice down at the bottom left area of the screen. There’S a button that you can click to switch from Google Maps, view to Google Earth view, and you can see it looks kind of like you’re in Google Earth at this point.
So it just depends on what your preference is, whether you want the maps view or the earth view, but, to be honest, I think really most people that use Google Maps it’s not so much to learn about the world and learn about geography and things like that. It’S rather to get directions from one place to another, and so you can do that here at the left. In addition to having this image of a part of Clarksville and some quick facts about Clarksville, it’s got some options here for directions.
You can also save this as a place that maybe you’re gon na look up a lot that you might go to a lot, but most people will just click here on directions, and maybe they want directions from Nashville. Let’S say to Clarksville, you can just hit enter and it shows the quickest route. It also shows some other routes that you might want to take if you want to you can switch so that it, instead of from Nashville to Clarksville its Clarksville to Nashville now you’ll notice. Those same alternate routes appear here at the left. So maybe you would like to take a scenic route. You could switch to a different one of these, or maybe you want to bypass some construction, there’s different options that you have.
Okay, not only that, but you can go up to the top and you can specify that you’re not gon na be taking a car. Maybe maybe you won’t be driving, but rather you’ll be taking public transit and it looks like there just aren’t some great options available right now for that? What about walking? Okay? And it gives you an estimate whether you’re, writing, transit or driving or taking a bike or walking it gives you an estimate for how long that’s gon na take okay. You can see that total miles and total amount of time.
Okay, I’m gon na switch back to driving and notice that there are options here. If you click on options, you can change from miles to kilometers or whatever you like to do. You can say you want to avoid toll booths.
You want to avoid ferries and highways. Okay, so that’s really gon na change the route that it suggests. If you change some of these options, if you click OK, you can also go here and change it from leave now to depart at or arrive by now. Why does this matter? Well, if I’m departing now, maybe traffic is nice, but what about? At 5:00 p.m.
on a Friday, that’s gon na change the estimate for how long it’s gon na take to get from place to place, at least in some cases. In this case, it didn’t seem to change it at all, but in many cases it will now what if there’s three stops in your trip instead of just Nashville and Clarksville? What, if there’s a third stop as well? Okay, I can just go back and I’ll click on leave now and I’ll. Just click this plus sign to add a third destination. Okay, so if I add that one and then I hit enter and again, it changes the results – and if I want to, I can click to reorder these in a way that makes a little bit more sense.
But this is just a really great way. I think to plan a trip and plan a route from one place to another. We do have some other tools that you should be aware of here in the lower right corner.
We’Ve got this gentleman here that kind of jumps to the side. Once you put your mouse on top of him, we’ve got some images and then these little arrows pointing up well what these images are. If you click on the images it gives you some thumbnails that help you have a sense of what this place looks like it’s got a picture of Nashville.
It’S got a picture of Clarksville and some landmarks and places like that. So that’s kind of nice. This gentleman here, if you click on him and drag him onto the map, he looks a little reluctant okay but as you click and drag and drop him somewhere, look what happens. He will pull you down onto the road and into the map, and you can then click and drag and look around and you can see what that part of the map looks like this is called Street View and it’s a lot of fun.
It’S inside of Google Earth, as well as Google Maps, okay, so it’s kind of fun. You can even double click on the road to move down the road and get a sense of the area when you’re done with Google Street View, you can just click this arrow. This back arrow to get back out to the map, view alright, and then these arrows here at the right, those are just to expand or collapse. The thumbnails that you see so not a big deal there. You can zoom in using these plus and minus signs. If you prefer to use those instead of the scroll wheel to zoom in and zoom out, so those are most of the options that you have in Google Maps here in the upper left. There is a menu that you can click and you can change it to show traffic. You can change it to show terrain and different things like that. So those are some nice options to investigate, also notice that there is an option to print. You can print your directions. You can print the maps that you’re looking at and there’s some other advanced things that you can do as well. You can add contributions to this a timeline and there’s a way that you can share or embed the map. Okay.
So here’s the share link: you can shorten the URL. If you need to there’s also an embed option, you can copy that embed code and put it on your own website or blog now, to show the last couple of things about Google Maps. I’M gon na X out of this trip that I planned, because I want you to see that, in addition to planning a trip and getting directions and things like that and learning about the world, there’s a couple of other things you can do with Google Maps and That is, you can learn about what things are nearby a particular place. So let’s say I’m going to be visiting Clark’s well, I would like to know what’s nearby so I’ll click on nearby, and it gives me some suggestions what restaurants are nearby okay and it pops up with some interesting options. Okay, those are some restaurants nearby.
If I X, out of that, I can go back and say: okay, what about nearby hotels, and it gives me some suggestions, including prices for those suggested hotels. So that’s a nice feature now what, if you’re looking for something else? Okay, maybe a music store I’d like to know what music stores are available in Nashville, probably quite a few right. You would think so. I do a search and it brought up, at least in Clarksville, a few different options for music stores. Okay, so that’s a nice option to be able to search nearby notice that you can also send some of this information to your phone, which i think is a nice convenient option. You can just click that you’ll sign into your Google account and then send to your phone, the Google map, and I believe it pulls up in the Google Maps app. Finally, there is an option to share if you click on share. It takes us to that same embed, share link, option that we saw earlier.
So that is pretty much what you need to know in order to use Google Maps notice. I didn’t even sign into my account you don’t really have to, but if you want to use all of the features that are available, it is kind of nice to sign into your account if you like Google Maps and would like to learn more and maybe like To learn how to make your own Google Maps, I highly recommend that you watch my other video called Google my maps thanks for watching. I hope you enjoy using Google Maps and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new video, at least every Monday. .