This afternoon I received an email from a reader who was frustrated by how slowly Google Earth loaded on her students’ Chromebooks. She had designed some activities about distance that she wanted her students to complete using the measurement tools in Google Earth, but it was loading so slowly for many students that the activity was taking much longer than necessary. She reached out to me for ideas for alternatives to Google Earth.
My suggestion if you need an alternative to Google Earth for geography-based distance measurement lessons is to try using Bing Maps or Google Maps in your web browser. In my experience Bing Maps generally loads a little faster, but both tools load much faster than Google Earth. In the following videos I demonstrate how to measure distance with Google Maps and with Bing Maps.
