Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Earth Basics Tutorial”.
In this article tutorial we’re going to learn about the basics of using Google Earth, and the first thing you need to know is how to get it. The way you get it is by going to google.com forward, slash Earth and then just click download Google Earth, as it indicates here, there’s a Google Earth and then there’s Google Earth Pro. That does have a cost associated with it. In some cases, if you’re a teacher, you may be able to get Google Earth Pro for free and you would most likely want to contact your school district or statewide technology folks to find out. If that’s the case, for you in your area.
But even if you don’t get access to Google Earth Pro, the regular Google Earth is excellent and you can just go here and click download Google Earth to get started. You would read, agree in download and install that on your computer and once you’ve done so just open it up, and it should look something like this as it opens up and you have our beautiful earth right there in front of you. But now what do you do? Well, that’s where this video comes into play, to teach you how to navigate in Google Earth and a few other basics, and then, if you’d like to learn more about Google Earth, you can watch some of my other videos that go into more detail about some of The other things you can do with it. The first thing you need to know about Google Earth is how to navigate around the earth and move from place to place and the most basic way to do. That is just to use the mouse you can see when I have my mouse pointer on the Earth or around the Earth.
It turns into a hand – and I can use that hand to click on the earth and drag to rotate the earth a little bit. Okay and you can just drag right or left, you can drag up or down diagonal. I mean you can just drag the earth any which way you’d like now.
You can also just click on it and give it a pull and let go. I let go over. The mouse and if you want to feel powerful, give that a try you’ll feel great the rest of the day. So that’s pretty simple so far, but in addition to doing that, there’s a little technique that I like to use.
Ok – and that is you know, sometimes as you’re dragging around on the earth things will get. You know a little disoriented, at least in a way that I’m not used to, and if you want to straighten that out and make it look the way you would typically think about South America in this case, what you can do is you can click and then Just drag the earth in some circles and that usually takes you back to where you would like it to be and to look the way you want it to look now if you drag the circles in the other direction clockwise in this case it it looks a Little different, okay, so that’s a little technique that I use that’s kind of nice and it helps me to orient the earth the way I want to see it now. There’S another way you can do a similar thing up here in the upper right corner. We’Ll look at that in just a minute, but first, let’s learn about some of the other mouse tools that you’ll be using in addition to click and hold and drag.
You can also use the mouse button to zoom, so I’ll, just double click, and this is a left click on a particular part of the world and it zooms in on that exact location on the earth. If I double click again, it will zoom in even closer, and I can just continue to do this – to focus in on a very specific part of the world. Ok and now, in addition to double clicking to zoom, there’s another option, and that is to use the scroll wheel on your mouse. And so I’m just putting one of my fingers on the scroll wheel and I’m pushing up to scroll up. And it brings me in to the picture more closely. Ok, you can see that now. If I use the scroll wheel and go down, then i zoom out.
Ok, so that’s pretty nice and pretty easy once you get the hang of that. Ok, so we’ve learned a couple of different ways to zoom in and one nice way to zoom out now you might be able to guess another way to zoom out. If you double right click, it will zoom out quite a ways and then you could double right.
Click again and it zooms out pretty far so a double left-click will zoom in double right. Click will zoom out all right now, it’s time to learn about these tools in the upper right corner. The first tool here in the upper right, I’d like to point to is the zoom tool. It’S yet another way to zoom and the way this works. Is you just click and drag on this handle and pull up to zoom in on that slider? And you pull down to zoom out, okay, so that’s another way to zoom. I rarely use that.
To be honest, above it, there is a move around option that looks like a hand and instead of clicking and dragging on the earth itself, you could just put your mouse here on this tool: click and pull to the left notice that my mouse isn’t really on The tool it starts out on the tool, but then I drag to the left, click on it again drag to the right. You don’t even have to let go of your click. Andrey click. You can just move the mouse around as you continue to hold the button and that works great okay, now above that, there’s yet another tool and there’s actually two parts to this particular tool. One is the orientation aspect of it up here at the top notice that there’s a ring around this circle and the ring has an N in it that n, as you probably guessed, stands for north, and so I can click and drag to orient North a different Direction in a different way, and so that’s another way that you can kind of reorient the earth when it gets kind of out of whack you could just instead of using my awesome circular technique, you could just go up here and click and drag on the N And put it where you want it to be: okay, now, there’s one more tool: it’s here. For some reason, Google decided to combine these two tools. They are somewhat related, but this particular tool in the center. It has an eye on it, okay and what this is for. It is for changing the angle of your view: okay, so I’m zooming in to South America.
Okay, the Andes are around here somewhere, okay, that’s probably where they are, and I’m zooming in on those mountain ranges and things and looks pretty nice. But if I go up here and click on the eyeball, I can pull up or push up and look what happens? It’S changing the angle so that I can get a little bit better view kind of a 3d view of these mountain ranges and these these mountains and so kind of a cool kind of a fun thing that you can do. You can change the angle of your view. Okay now you may have noticed that, as I zoomed in closer, I got another tool, a fifth tool here in the upper right, and it looks like a gentleman standing on a green, disc or circle. Now what that is. That’S the Street View tool and the way it works is when that gentleman appears. It means that you can click on him and drag and drop in on to the earth. Typically, people use this on street. So that’s why it’s called Street View, but you can also drag and drop him now onto some scenery. You know something out in nature and it often will work.
I’M going to exit ground level view or Street View to show you what it’s more often used for, and that is like I said before on streets. So, let’s see if we can find a street to use this on as i zoom in closer to this city, the gentleman here appears the Street View guy and I can click and drag and drop him on a street in this case in Santiago, Chile, and look What it does it puts me down on the street and I’m in Street View what this is is basically it’s an interactive photo, but it’s a 360-degree interactive photo. The reason I say it’s interactive is you: can click to move down the street? It’S almost like being in a video game. Okay – and I can just click to navigate through here – and I can look around it’s a great way to learn about the world and see what a place looks like you know before you go there or if it’s something that you’re studying or that you are teaching Students, it’s it’s a wonderful tool, so I’m going to click exit Street View to get out of Street View. We have now learned most of the very basics of using Google Earth just to review.
There’S several Mouse operations that you need to know double clicking with the left mouse button to zoom in double right, clicking to zoom out the scroll wheel, also zooms in and out you can click and hold and drag to move the earth around, and we have these Tools in the upper right that are so good for zooming moving, changing the perspective or the angle changing where North is and then we also have Street View all right. So I’m going to zoom out a little bit to get a different view of the earth. A different part of the world – and at this point I want to move over here to the left side of the screen, because I want to show you that, yes, you can browse around the world like I’ve been doing, and you can zoom in and try to Find places that way and that works fine, but remember this is Google Earth. It was made by Google what is Google famous for and excellent at many things, but mainly Google made its fame with search notice here in the upper left corner. You don’t have to just browse and find South Africa or Nigeria or wherever you want to go.
You can search here in the upper left corner, so I could type in Nigeria hit enter or click search, and I am now being flown, and that is the term that Google Earth uses I am being flown to Nigeria. Now it takes me only so far and then I could use my scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in or I could double left-click to zoom in now. Not only can you search for a country you could search for a continent. Okay, you can search for a city and it will fly you to the city, alright, and you can also search for landmarks. So, for example, I would like to see the Eiffel Tower I hit enter and it’s flying me to see the Eiffel Tower.
So this Google Earth search is really great and that’s most often how I find a location in Google Earth is by using the search. Alright, let’s move down the screen here at the left. In addition to searching, you can also do some cool things down here in places and that’s for another time in a different video tutorial, but below that there’s also information about layers and a lot of people see that and just don’t know what it is or what It’S talking about, but what these layers are is they add in or take out content from your Google Earth experience and it’s temporary, the adding in or the taking out its temporary? You can change your mind easily, but let’s take a look at what you can do with this and I’ll just show a couple of examples. One you’ll notice that here around the Eiffel Tower you can see that there’s some 3d effects going on. I mean that looks like a 3d representation of the Eiffel Tower, and these buildings, near to the Eiffel Tower are also in 3d.
Now this is wonderful. This is great unless you don’t have a strong internet connection, let’s say: you’re flying in Google Earth over Washington DC or Paris, France or wherever it might be. Where there’s lots and lots of buildings, Google Earth is going to try to render them in 3d. If it can, but if there’s too many buildings, it may be too much for your computer and your computer may start to slow down and it may freeze up or Google Earth itself may freeze up. So you might choose to turn off 3d buildings.
If I uncheck that look, what it does, it just makes a flat image for me to experience there and look at so that’s one of the layers add in 3d buildings or take out 3d buildings. It’S up to you another example of layers. I’M going to zoom out to show this, but you probably noticed that we have an artificial view of the earth by default, at least for me it’s by default. I have the borders and labels of the earth.
Now that may be very useful. It might be exactly what you want, but if it’s not uncheck borders and labels, and to do this, you may need to click the arrow to the left of that category and then uncheck borders. So now you see it gets rid of the borders.
The lines that are not, of course, you know really visible in in many cases, from space, and if I want them back, I just click to put them back. Labels are things like you know: labeling landmarks, labeling, capital, cities and things like that. Another layer you should be aware of is photos if i zoom in on a particular part of the earth, and I turn on photos, watch what happens. Suddenly, you get lots of little squares or rectangles popping up. Each of those represents a photograph that was taken supposedly in that exact place on the earth, so I can click on this photo, for example, and it should bring up a of the Sahara Desert and it did and supposedly that photo was taken in this exact location. You can even see the latitude and longitude down here wherever you put your mouse, the latitude and longitude are indicated down here at the bottom of the screen. Okay, so these photos that can really be a wonderful thing. They can add a lot to your Google Earth. Experience because it’s more information, it’s more content that you may want to experience and and see you can get more information about a place by looking at these photos. It’S beautiful, however, from time to time it becomes too much so, for example, if I fly to the Statue of Liberty, okay, it’s going to fly me there you’ll see that you know sometimes there’s just so many photographs that it can kind of muddy the waters and And it makes it kind of hard to enjoy the view, and so that’s why you may want to turn them off from time to time all right, other layers that are included, there’s an ocean layer that will show some marine information. It’Ll show you where fish often are and also landmarks of where there have been shipwrecks and things like that, so that’s kind of fun, there’s a weather layer. You turn that on and it tells you the weather, but also as you zoom out look what you see. You see cloud cover and it’s almost like a radar report on the news, and you can turn that off.
You can turn it on and I have heard of teachers actually having their students create newscasts and they can use Google Earth as the weather radar for the weather report. It’S kind of a fun idea that some teachers do with their students. I’M going to turn off weather, there’s some other wonderful things to check out, for example, the gallery. You should really check out the Google Earth gallery.
It can add in some great content and there’s much more to explore all right. So at this point I think you’re ready to start using Google Earth as a way to learn about the world in a future tutorial. I would like to show you some other tools that we have across the top of the screen here. There’S some exciting things that you can do with them, and I also have a tutorial on how to create your own Google Earth tours.
So, if you’d like to check that out, you can begin making your own Google Earth tours. So I hope you enjoy using Google thanks for watching and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel to get more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new video uploaded each Monday and sometimes more often than that. .