A New Collection of 17,000+ Historical Maps and Images

Flickr's The Commons is a great place to find all kinds of interesting historical photographs from museums and libraries all over the world. Recently, The British Library added a new collection of maps to Flickr's The Commons. The new collection is called the King's Topographical Collection and it contains more than 17,000 historical maps and images related to maps. 

The King's Topographical Collection is comprised of maps and drawings produced between 1500 and 1824. You can browse through, view, and download all of the maps and drawings in the collection. Unfortunately, the ability to search within the collection on Flickr is limited to just using "control+F" to search for words on the displayed page. When you do find something you like, click the download button on the image to save it in resolution of your choice. 

 
Applications for Education
The lack of a good search function is a limiting factor in using this collection in a meaningful way. That said, if you have the time to browse through it there could be some good materials to overlay onto Google Earth to make comparisons of historical maps and current maps. Of course, you could also just have students browse the collection to see if there is something that sparks their curiosity and then use that to jump into a little research activity.

Here's an overview of how to overlay historical imagery onto current Google Earth imagery. 

H/T to Open Culture.

Lucidspark - A New Collaborative Online Whiteboard Option

Lucidspark is a new collaborative whiteboard tool from the makers of the popular Lucidchart service. Lucidspark has all of the features that we've come to expect in an online whiteboard tool. It contains tools for placing pre-made shapes, drawing with a pen tool, and adding text to the screen. There is a wide array of color options for all of the elements that you add to your whiteboard in Lucidspark. 

There are two elements of Lucidspark that differentiate it from some of its competitors. First, Lucidspark offers a large gallery of templates that you can apply to your whiteboard. That gallery includes templates for things like concept maps, flowcharts, empathy maps, and story maps. The sharing menu is the other area in which Lucidspark separates itself from some of its competitors. The sharing options in Lucidspark will remind many people of the options found in Google Docs. You can share your Lucidspark pages as "view only," "comment only," and "edit." You can send collaboration invitations via email or by simply posting a link in your LMS. 

Here's a video overview of Lucidspark. 

Applications for Education

Lucidspark, like many other online whiteboard tools, could be a useful tool for teachers conducting live online or hybrid classes. Much like using Jamboard instead of Zoom's whiteboard tool, using Lucidspark when you need to sketch a concept map or illustrate a point enables you to share that sketch later and use it in other places independently of Zoom (or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams). 

TED-Ed Explains the Basics of Stocks and Investing

TED-Ed has released a new lesson that should be of interest to anyone who has hopes of retiring some day. That lesson is titled How Do Investors Choose Stocks? Some of the highlights of the lesson include a basic explanation of what a stock and the stock market is, the differences between active and passive investing in the stock market, why some people pick one of those approaches over the other, and how traders analyze the prospects of a stock. 

Applications for Education
This TED-Ed lesson could be a great introduction to a larger lesson on stock markets. If I was still teaching social studies I would definitely include this video as introductory material before my students played a stock market simulation game.