Google Maps Street View is a great tool for showing students what various towns and cities around the world look like. Earlier this week I used Street View in one of my US History classes to show my students what Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts look like today.
Yesterday, Google announced that Street View imagery is now available for locations on all seven continents. The most recent update includes imagery from Antarctica. Check out this image from the Half Moon Island area of Antarctica.
Kids.gov and Challenge.gov together are hosting an infographic creation contest for kids. To enter the contest students have to create an infographic that explains the process of becoming President of the United States. The contest appears to be open to all K-12 students. The winner of the contest will receive $2,500 and the winning infographic will be reproduced for distribution to schools across the US. The deadline for entries is November 3. Read all of the contest rules and requirements here.
Show World is an interactive mapping website that takes demographic, economic, environmental, and political data sets and creates maps based on those data. This can be done with Google Earth and Google Maps before, but Show World is slightly different. Each time you select a different data set, the size of each country increases or decreases in comparison to other countries. For example, if you select the data set about steel production, the size of China is huge relative to African countries. On the other hand, if you select the data set for students not in school, the African countries swell while China decreases in size.
The maps generated by Show World can be downloaded. You can also embed the animated maps into your blog. To get the embed code you do have to submit your email address.
Applications for Education Show World is a great way for students to visually interpret data sets. Having students explore the data sets and watch the size of the countries change could be a good discussion starting activity. Exploring the data sets on Show World could also be the starting point for research about the economic and social conditions of countries around the world.
As usual the end of the month jumped-up and surprised me again. It seems like just a week ago I was meeting my new students, but then I looked at the calendar and realized that I've been back in school for a month now and I know all (100+) of my students' names. I hope everyone has had a great start to their new school years.
This month again saw new record highs for visitors and subscribers. As always, thank you all for helping to spread the word about Free Technology for Teachers. Together we can help more teachers learn about free resources that can improve their students' learning experiences. Thank you.
Earlier this month I wrote a post about A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet. There is an update to that post that includes the new RSS feed for that website. Check it out.
