My Maps to Visually Document and Tell Stories

Blogical Minds, a 5th grade teacher's blog for working with her students, a post asks how to use Google Maps in the classroom. She has her students using it to document commenters to their classroom blogs. What a neat idea! It creates a lot of geography mini lessons that would not exist otherwise with maybe a little history thrown in. She then asks for more ideas. I offered the following in the comments just in case you are interested. I see ties to digital storytelling and science here as well as the aforementioned geography and history.

I plan on using it this summer to document our family summer trip. I am going to take photos along the way and decide which ones best represent our experience. I will then load then into My Maps (new feature with Google Maps) at the appropriate point on the map so my students and peers can see virtually our journey. I can add the picture (linked from my Flickr account) and then a description of what we did in that area or why it is important to note. Since my wife is not big on having my six year old's face on the Internet, He will just be adding description and taking photos with me instead. His class next year will enjoy the new style digital story he will have to tell.

I am going to encourage my students to do the same in the hopes that they will share it with their teachers next year and get them energized into using more technology.

A neat thing about My Maps is that you can make them public or keep them private, so that is good for my classroom use with students. I could do the same for science projects that our grade level does when they map out a piece of property.

Folks are already creating some neat My Maps that they are sharing:

Hosting Olympics Cities
Every Major League Baseball Park and HOF
Our Earth as Art (sat images)
America's Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66

Of course there are even more to look at. One idea I would like to elaborate on (for my memory if nothing else) is that you can zoom in rather closely in Google Maps. It would allow our science students to document the findings of our wetlands project location with pictures and descriptions using coordinates. I am sure the Texas Parks and Wildlife group would love to have that. I just need to get them some GPS handhelds now to help with that.

It would also be a great addition to our school website where potential visitors and home buyers can virtually visit our campus and see what grades are where and which facilities are which. If we really want to take it one step further, we could label classrooms by teacher or subject and contact info.

If you are logged into your Google account, then just click on the maps link on the Google home page just above the search window. It will open Google Maps with a new tab added on the left called My Maps. It is pretty simple to do. Find Google's directions here. Please come back and share what you create. I will post mine when we return from Florida. My son is going to have an awesome "My Summer Vacation" report to share with his class next year.

And the best thing about it all is that it is another FREE tool to use with our students.

Technorati Tags: google_maps, Scott_S_Floyd, TXBWP, my_maps, science, art, geography, digital_story_telling

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