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 gonna do a search for Clarksville comma TN and it's gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna take okay you can see that total miles and total amount of time okay I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna change the estimate for how long it's gonna 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 gonna 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

Channel: Technology for Teachers and Students

Views: 428,861

Keywords: Google Maps, google maps tutorial, online maps, google maps, beginner's tips for google maps, learn to use google maps, google maps basics, mapping online, using google maps, how to use google maps, effectively using google maps

Id: XQUaQpoF8xE

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2017