Google Earth is one of my favorite tools to use in history and geography lessons. Google Earth enables students to see and explore places in ways that printed maps and images never could. One of the features of Google Earth that I love to use in history lessons is the image overlay function.

In the following video I demonstrate how to create image overlays in Google Earth.

Applications for Education

Image overlays in Google Earth let students make comparisons of historical maps with current maps. Image overlays can also be used to overlay different map types on top of the default Google Earth imagery.

The Library of Congress has a great collection of nearly 40,000 historical maps that students can download and reuse for free. That’s where I got the image for this blog post as well as the image overlaid in the video above.

Google Earth can be used for a lot more than just social studies lessons. In fact, I have a Practical Ed Tech on-demand webinar about that topic.