Thing 40: Mapping & Geography Tools

As a high school social studies teacher I was super excite for this Cool Tools "thing". Geography is something the students always struggle with so when they can use real and tangible tools to see maps that are personalized it really sticks with them. For me personally when I taught History of Rochester I had students use Google Maps to show where their Rochester communities were and talk about similarities of "immigrant" neighborhoods. The students liked being able to put down their pins and it was an easy visual for the class to spark discussion. I've also used Historypin a few times for PD and Thinglink which can be similarly used. When students have free time I have them play Geoguessr and the "airport" Google Maps game where they discover countries and places they never heard of which is useful for the AP kids. If I get the chance to teach History of Rochester again or even my beginning of the year project of thinking like a historian I am going to use "What Was There" to have students build Rochester and their family's history. I really like "What Was There" because it has an iOS app and it gives students a historic "Instagram" feel. I was really drawn to Google Lit Maps as a cross curricular project with English as they have been reading Night by Eli Wiesel to plot the displacement of Jews during the Holocaust. Or even currently with my global crisis project if students choose immigration and migration they can make a personal Google map showing the travels. I am looking forward to sharing these tools with the rest of the Global I and Global II teams during common planning time.


Below is an example of the neighborhood similarities spoken of earlier for History of Rochester to build class culture.