How to create a mobile city guide as class project

Ingredients

• Google Sites
• Picasa
• Google Maps

One great class project could be to create a mobile tourist guide of their city or town (geography or foreign language class, or in combination). Google sites now lets you create mobile friendly websites. All you need to do is use a mobile friendly template when creating a new site. The students are grouped into teams.

The single teams then make web pages of the sights and other places of their town.  They post their own photographs to a Picasa album. Google Sites has an option to insert photos directly from Picasa. Of course, the mobile guide also needs a map of the places. The photos can be put on a Google map (see Creating a field trip photo & map mashup) and the map can be inserted directly from Sites without using the embed code.
A great feature would be linking the places on the map to the single pages in Sites.

Directions:

1. Create a Google site with a mobile template
2. Students write pages for the single places
3. Students take pictures, upload them to Picasa and insert them into the site
4. Create a Google map with the pictures linking to the corresponding pages
5. Create QR codes for all pages and put them near the real places and sights so that tourists can scan them and read the corresponding information about the places.