Like thousands of other teachers, last week I got a reminder from Google that Expeditions and Tour Creator will be shut down at the end of June. I like and use both products so I’m a bit disappointed by Google’s decision. Based on the emails I’ve received, I’m not the only one.

Rather than groaning about Google’s decision to shut down Expeditions and Tour Creator, I’ve sought out some alternatives to both tools. I put those alternatives and descriptions of them in this Google Doc. A couple of highlights from that document are featured below.

Google Arts & Culture

The Google Arts & Culture app includes many of the experiences that are present in Google Expeditions. The one thing that you can’t do is guide students on tours. Google has introduced a new teacher center for Google Arts & Culture. In this video I provide an overview of how to use the Google Arts & Culture teacher center. The video includes directions for sharing specific portions of an Arts & Culture experience with your students.

Story Spheres

Story Spheres is a neat tool for adding audio recordings to 360 imagery. Story Spheres lets you upload short audio recordings in which you describe to viewers what they’re seeing, the history of what they’re seeing, and the significance of what’s in the scene they’re seeing. It’s possible to upload multiple recordings. When you’re done you can share your Story Spheres story in a blog post, on social media, or any other place that you typically post a link.

Take a look at this Story Spheres story about Uluru to get a better sense of what can be done with Story Spheres. I wrote directions for how to use Story Spheres. You can read those directions here or watch my video about how to make a Story Spheres story.

These were my post popular posts of the week:

1. 19 Canva Tutorials for Teachers and Students – Certificates, Comics, and More!

2. 12 Fun, Challenging, and Interesting Geography Games for Students

3. e-Comments Makes It Easy to Add Canned Comments to Documents and Learning Management Systems

4. How to Quickly Duplicate and Sort Jamboard Pages

5. Thousands of National Parks Pictures and Videos to Use in Google Earth

6. How to Add Audio to TeacherMade Activities – And Integrate Google Classroom

7. How to Create Your Own Online Board Game

Self-paced Professional Development Courses

Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know
A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video
A Crash Course in Google Earth & Maps for Social Studies
Recommended Listening

Spaces EDU is releasing 21 short audio interviews with educators over the next three weeks. Each interview contains a quick tip for teachers to try. Find the interviews here.

As always, please feel free to hit reply to ask me anything.

Have a great week!

~Richard