Beyond Method #3: Geography and Travel

View My Favorite Texas State Parks in a larger map

Where in the World? Geography and Travel 2.0

This was not a good day to try Google Maps, as apparently users having been having issues saving their edits since yesterday. But at least one Google user posted a temporary workaround (while simultaneously berating Google for not getting its act together quickly enough).

I've mapped my favorite Texas State Parks that I've visited. Before I came across the aforementioned Help forum post, unsuccessful saving was probably my biggest difficulty in putting my map together. But once I was able to use the workaround, the instructions posted on Beyond Two Steppin', coupled with Google's guide on how to add content to maps, made this a really fun, easy process.

While I've created maps in Google before — such as a map of where our library was located on our homepage — I've never added rich media content to my markers. I feel really add value and visual information. I definitely can see the library continuing this practice. In fact, inspired by this course, my director has already added two additional maps to our website that we think will help patrons: public libraries in our county and schools in our city.

In addition to its ease of creation, I greatly appreciate how easy Google maps makes it to share, link to and embed the maps you make. At the same time, however, I'm seeing the value in including the link to the actual map because of the map's actual dimensions, when embedded, limits how much of the rich media content you can actually see when the map is embedded into a blog. Good to know.