Google Earth

Summer 2025: 

World Travel with Google Earth

As a summer learning challenge that you can do at your own pace, here is a special edition of Tech-splorations that builds on the exciting travel-related activities we provided in June’s Share and Learn session.

Have you heard of Google Earth? If not, you’re in for a treat. If Google Maps can be thought of as an awesome neighbourhood fireworks display, Google Earth is the equivalent of the Canada Day pyrotechnics in Ottawa!

While there are versions that can be downloaded and installed to different devices, we’re going to cover the web-based version that can be accessed by anyone using any browser. (Google will tell you things work better using their Chrome browser, but they’re very minor!)

Below is a link to a YouTube video titled “Google Earth for Beginners: The Complete Course”. The entire course takes only 27 minutes to watch, but there’s a lot of content being covered. I suggest you view it using the following approach:

• Watch the entire video to get a sense of what you can do using Google Earth, but don’t try to take notes. Just marvel at the features and views of our planet.

  • https://youtu.be/7wsYJnnL2yM?si=oC0eSe70iIrp8iT9

• If you want to try it out yourself, I encourage you to watch one chapter at a time, in the order below, and then practice some of the things shown in that chapter.

  • Take your time and re-watch any chapter to reinforce the learning.

  • If you don’t see any benefit in learning to create a Slideshow or using the tools shown at the end of the video, just skip those chapters when you re-watch the others.

• Please send your feedback to our club’s email address to let us know what you think of Google Earth!

Chapters (click on the chapter title to access its link):

1. Intro and Navigating Around : This introduces you to Google Earth and shows you the basic controls to move around the globe.

2. Layers : Learn how to see more, or less, detail in your viewing.

3. Create a Google Earth Tour : Learn how to save a collection of locations from around the world that you can retrieve when wanted (you will need to be a Gmail user and/or have a Google account so you can save locations to Google Drive).

4. Slideshow - Part 1 : Learn to put your locations together into a sequence of visits. (You’ll want to watch Part 2 immediately after this one.)  

5. Slideshow - Part 2 : After a brief product endorsement, which I’ve skipped, continue learning about creating slideshows.

6. Other Tools : A few additional tools are discussed that might be helpful.