In this tutorial I'll be giving a basic overview of Google MyMaps.
The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you are signed into your Google account
Google will save your map to your Google account so if you're not signed in you won't be able to retain any of the work that you've done
Once you're signed in go to google.com/mymaps
in the top left hand corner of the mymaps screen is a create a new map button, click that to get started
it will bring it to a basic version of Google Earth where you can import data points in order to create your map
the data set that I'll be working with is from data.gov which is an open sourced
collection of data hosted by the U.S. government
the dataset I will be using is a modified version of a postsecondary education data set so I will title my map:
post secondary education
and hit save
this first layer will be my data later so I'll title it "data"
just below the title there is import, this allows you to insert data into your map
I'll be using a file that's on my computer.
The first prompt is asking for the position of your data points. This could either be done through addresses or longitude and latitude points.
It detected the word latitude and asigned that automatically but it does not detect the word longitude as it's missing an E
So I will tell it that this is longitude
and that
this should be treated as longitude and hit continue.
The second prompt is asking for title or what your data points should be named
I'll use institution name as the title of my data points and hit finish.
It's going to take a moment to load all your data into Google MyMaps and populate your map based on these
data points. It can take a couple seconds so be patient.
Now our map has been automatically populated with all the values from our dataset
Right now it's sort of difficult to tell where they are all placed, if I wanted to see these broken up by state
there's a way that I can change the styling of the data point to make it more clear
in the data later click uniform style
it defaults to grouping all your data points in a uniform style, you can change it to group them
by a particular column in your dataset. I'll change it to group them by state abbreviation.
Now it will apply unique styling to each of my unique state abbreviations. So this should color coordinate all my data points based on state.
And here we have it.
Now it's very easy to tell which institutions belong to which states.
If I want to add a data point, I can zoom in to its location
and up hear in the top toolbar underneath the search box I can click "add marker"
Then simply click the location
and will allow you to fill out the another data point. This data point is Black Hills State University.
The city is Spearfish, and the state abbreviation is South Dakota.
So now I've added that data point to my map.
You can have multiple layers to display different kinds of information on the same map.
If I was interested in the relation between national forest land and postsecondary education institutions
I could create a second layer
called national forest land
and begin to trace areas of national forest land that I was interested in.
I'm going make sure that my data layer is unchecked so I'm not affecting that and under my forest land layer
I'm going to go to the top toolbar just to the right of place a marker to draw a line.
Then I'm going to click "add a line or shape". What this will allow me to do is set a multitude of points in order to define a shape.
So I'll go ahead and trace the black hills national forest.
And give it that title.
Now I can click off to deselect it and when I zoom out it continues to be clearly visible. I can now turn on my data layer again
and see how the black hills national forest relates to the rest of the institutions.
One other interesting thing you can do with your map is to change the base map. Right now it's set to regular map styling, mixing some
elements of roadways as well as terrain. You can change it to something like satellite view if you're more interested
in that.
When your map is finished there a couple different ways that you can share it.
Up here at the top click "share".
You can create this link
and change the privacy.
There are a bunch of different options as to who can have access to it. I'll change it to "publicly available on the web" and hit save.
In addition to that you can e-mail to -to people directly through this address bar.
When you've shared it with every one you'd like to, hit done.
One other interesting thing you can do with Google MyMaps is embed them in your own web sites.
Here this three dot menu just to the left of the search bar, if you click it and go down
to "embed on my site" it will give you an iframe you can simply copy
and paste it into your HTML code and it will display.
That's basic overview of Google MyMaps