Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Have students create their own descriptive maps
I have been playing with Scribble Maps off and on throughout the summer with my original plan being that I would somehow use it for map quizzes. Well I haven't been able to do that yet because it always gives the names of places, BUT - I have found a lot of other uses for it in class.
Scribble Maps is a mashup - that just means it's one big application - in this case Google Earth - that is "mashed up" with something else to make another specialized application. I have blogged about these before.
So here is what I am doing with Scribble Maps right now - my 8th grade World Geography students are doing a small project to learn more about economic indicators. After they learned about a few indicators and gathered some data, one of the steps in the project was to represent their data on a map.
Scribble Maps has been great for this - the students use different colors for different countries, they circle a particular country and then use the text box to make buttons for the different economic indicators. They also use the pinpoints to label centers of industry and government within the country, as well as points of recent conflict. It's unbelievably easy to use and there's no registration or sign up for the site.
Their Scribble Maps are just one part of the project - they can then use these maps in an online slide show they are putting together that they will narrate and explain the status of several chosen countries using the economic indicator data they have gathered and illustrated.
Scribble Maps can be saved and emailed, printed, or embedded into a wiki or blog.