In addition to publishing here on Free Technology for Teachers, I also publish on two other sites that I maintain. Take a look at the list below to see the other things I wrote in April.
Good morning from Maine where the clouds have returned after yesterday's reprieve from what feels like a month of rain. It's a great morning for making pour-over coffee and sipping it at a leisurely pace. But since I have young kids, I won't be sipping it at a leisurely pace. Instead, I'll drink it while we get ready for a visit to the Maine Wildlife Park. It's one of our favorite places to go regardless of the weather.
I hope that you have a fun weekend! If your definition of fun includes catching up on some articles about educational technology, take a look at the list below.
If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page.
The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
My YouTube channel has more than 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
On my YouTube channel and in my playlist of Google Forms tutorials you'll find tutorials for everything from the basics of making a quiz in Google Forms to adding voice comments to Google Forms and a whole bunch other things in between those extremes. Some highlights from the playlist are linked below.
AI search tools like ChatGPT infused into Bing and Google's Bard are getting a lot of attention right now. But when it's time to search most students still default to Google.com. Unfortunately, by relying on just Google.com and trendy AI search tools students are missing out on a lot of excellent excellent and helpful material. That's why we need to introduce our students to lesser-known search tools and databases that they're probably overlooking.
There are many alternatives to Google.com, ChatGPT, and Bard that students can try. One that I'll always make a case for is Google Scholar. Here are some others that I frequently recommend and teach students and teachers to use.
Your School Library! There’s a good chance that your school library and or local public library pays for a subscription to a database of academic articles. A few examples of those include JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, and ScienceDirect. The librarians in your school and public libraries will be happy, perhaps thrilled that you asked, to show your students how to access those databases through a library login.
In addition to the aforementioned subscription-required databases, there are free databases that your students can use in their research processes. Some popular choices include ERIC and Semantic Scholar.
Wolfram Alpha Wolfram Alpha bills itself as a computational search engine. It’s probably best known for helping students solve math problems as they can enter a problem and be shown the steps to solve it. An often overlooked aspect of Wolfram Alpha is the ability to enter a query and see a fact sheet displayed about the subject of the query. For example, entering “Martin Luther King” into Wolfram Alpha will result in seeing a fact sheet containing a list of key biographical facts about King’s life. Enter “Martin Luther King” and “John F. Kennedy” as part of the same query on Wolfram Alpha and you’ll see a side-by-side display of fact sheets about each man and see a timeline of where their lives overlapped. For students who need to quickly find just the basic facts about a topic, a query on Wolfram Alpha often leads them to the information they need faster than entering the same query on Google.com
Get The Research Get The Research is a fairly small search engine that is focused on helping people find academic articles. A search on Get The Research will yield a small summary of the searched topic and a list of published academic articles. The articles in the search results will be a mix of open-access articles and paywalled articles. You can filter results to show only open-access articles.
DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo is increasing in popularity because of its claim to offer private, untracked searching. Whereas Google and Bing will track your search history (through users’ Google or Microsoft accounts and or via browser settings), DuckDuckGo doesn’t track search history. There is a potential benefit to students using DuckDuckGo in addition to the privacy aspect. By not tracking search habits, DuckDuckGo’s search results are not influenced by a user’s past search and click histories. This has the potential to break students out of a bubble of results that are influenced by their past actions.
Spring in Maine means a lot of cold and wet weather. We have a bit of a reprieve today, but tomorrow we're back to cool and rainy weather for another five days (if the forecast is correct). This pattern puts a damper on many outdoor spring activities. I’m using this time to work through an online course. You could do the same.
I currently offer three professional development courses that you can start today and complete at your own pace. And from now through the end of May when you register for one course, you can register for a second course at 50% off.
Animated Explanations!
This five-part course teaches you everything you need to know to create and teach with your own animated explanations. In the course you’ll learn why the process of creating animated explanations is valuable to your students and to you. You’ll learn how to make everything from a simple one-frame animation to a complete animated video. Click here to learn more and get started today!
How to Create & Sell Your Own Digital Products
In this four-part course you’ll learn how to create and sell eBooks, webinars, video courses, lesson plans, and more! And I’ll help you promote your new products! All of the course material is delivered in a series of four weekly emails. Each lesson includes written materials, templates, and video tutorials. You can email me all of your questions as you go through the course. And at the end you can book a one-on-one Zoom call with me! Learn more here and get started here!
Five Video Projects for Almost Every Classroom
In this five-part course you’ll learn how to create and conduct video projects in almost any K-12 classroom! You can do these projects on Chromebooks, iPads, Mac, and Windows computers. Highlights of this course include making green screen videos, creating animated videos, and a variety of ways to create instructional videos. Learn more here and get started here.
If you’ve already taken one of these courses, thank you! Your support makes it possible for me to keep creating resources for teachers.
Yesterday, Rushton Hurley and I recorded the latest installment of our Two EdTech Guys Take Questions series. In the episode we answered questions about introductions to computer science, timing quizzes in Google Forms, and more. We also shared a few cool resources you might want to share with your students.
You can watch the latest episode of Two EdTech Guys Questions right here. On that same page you'll find links to the resources we mentioned in the episode as well as previous episodes.
GE Teach is a great map tool that is developed and maintained by a high school teacher in Texas named Josh Williams.
GE Teach has gone through a bunch of iterations over the years and the latest version is better than ever. On GE Teach students can compare two maps side-by-side. Students can select from gallery of map layers to compare side-by-side in GE Teach. In addition to comparing maps students can use drawing and measuring tools that you would typically find in Google's My Maps and Earth tools.
Applications for Education GE Teach provides a great way for students to compare data sets in a map environment. In the screenshot above you can see that I decided to compare energy use with population density. That comparison allows students to try to make correlations between energy use and population centers.
A bonus of GE Teach is that your students can enable the drawing and measuring tools without having to sign into a Google Account.
Four the last four months anything that I've published about AI (artificial intelligence) has vaulted to the top of the list of the most popular posts of the week, month, and year. I'm beginning to think that I if I just wrote AI AI AI AI AI for 500 lines that it would be the most popular thing I've ever published. All that to say, I've manually assembled the following collection of AI tools for teachers and related AI resources.
What is ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence tool that will create documents for you based on some minimal input from you. For example, I simply typed into ChatGPT "Ten Canva Features for Students" and got this article. ChatGPT can also be used to create poems like this one about the sunglasses worn by Geraint Thomas.
With a little tweaking of what you put into ChatGPT you can create longer articles than the one that I mentioned above. A simple, "tell me more" or "what about X" can generate more material from ChatGPT.
Google Bard is Google's attempt to rival ChatGPT. Over the coming months it's going to be incorporated into many of the Google Workspace tools that you're already using. Here's an overview of how it works.
Searching With ChatGPT in Bing
ChatGPT is now incorporated into Bing. You can choose to use it or not use it when conducting a search. This video shows you how it works and the difference in results when using it versus not using it.
EdPuzzle Teacher Assist
Edpuzzle is a tool that I’ve used for years to add questions to videos that I’ve made and videos that I’ve found on the web. At the start of 2020 it became more popular than ever as teachers watched this video to learn how to create video lessons without making their own recordings. This spring Edpuzzle made it easier than ever before to add interactive questions into videos that you’ve made or found online. That’s done through the use of an AI feature called Edpuzzle Teacher Assist.
Edpuzzle’s Teacher Assist feature will automatically generate questions that you can add into the video assignments that you give to your students. With just a click you can have multiple choice and short-answer questions added to videos you’ve made and videos that you’ve found online. Watch this short video to see Edpuzzle Teacher Assist in action.
Canva Magic Design
Canva’s Magic Design tool can be used to create a complete slideshow presentation from just one sentence. To be clear, it doesn’t just design the layout of the slides. It populates the slides with text and graphics to support the presentation topic! Watch this video to see how Canva’s Magic Design tool can create a presentation for you from just one simple prompt.
Canva Magic Write
Magic Write is the artificial intelligence tool built into Canva Docs. Magic Write works in a manner that is quite similar to ChatGPT. To use Magic Write you simply select it from the insert menu in Canva Docs. Once Magic Write is opened you then enter a short prompt like "green screen video tips" and Magic Write generates a short list or paragraph for you (formatting depends on the prompt). You can then insert that writing into your document as it was written or you can edit it before including it in your document. Watch this short video to see how Magic Write in Canva works.
gotFeedback gotFeedback is a tool that you can use to more efficiently give your students feedback on their writing. As the title of this post stated, gotFeedback uses artificial intelligence to help you provide your students with feedback on their writing. Watch my video that is embedded below to see how you can use gotFeedback to analyze your students’ writing.
Lumen5
Lumen5 is a tool that will produce a video for you based upon your written work. To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or submit the text of an article you've written. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. The video will always begin with the title of your article. From there it will use any subheadings or section headings that you have in your article to create sections of your video. If you don't have subheadings or section headings in your article, Lumen5 will attempt to pull the keywords or phrases from each paragraph. Watch my demo below to see how easy it is to use Lumen5.
Whimsical is a mind mapping and concept mapping tool that I first tried a couple of years ago. In addition to mind mapping and concept mapping it can also be used for creating Venn diagrams and other common charts in a collaborative environment. Now Whimsical has an artificial intelligence component. Whimsical's AI tool generates concept maps based on any keyword or phrase that you center on the screen. To use Whimsical's AI concept mapping tool you simply have to start a new concept map, enter a keyword or phrase, and then click the AI icon. The tool will then generate a simple concept map of linked terms and phrases.
Detecting AI-generated Content
GPTZero is a free tool that analyzes text to determine whether or not it was written by an artificial intelligence program. There are some features of GPTZero that make it a bit different from some of the other AI detection tools that I've tried. First, in addition to accepting text that you copy and paste into it, GPTZero lets you upload PDFs, Word docs, and TXT files to analyze them. Second, GPTZero will highlight for you the parts of an article that it determines to have a high likelihood of being written by an AI tool. Third, GPTZero provides a perplexity score and a burstiness score to illustrate how it was determined that a document was or was not written by an AI tool.
AI Text Classifier is a free tool from Open AI, the makers of ChatGPT, that will detect whether or not a passage of text has been written with ChatGPT and similar AI writing tools. To use AI Text Classifier you do need to have registered for a free account on Open AI. Once you have an account you can use AI Text Classifier. To use AI Text Classifier you simply have to paste a block of writing (at least 1,000 characters, roughly 175 words) into the text field and click the submit button. AI Text Classifier will then rank the writing as very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely written by AI. For the record, AI Text Classifier classified my article about detecting writing created by AI as very unlikely to have been written by AI.
AI Writing Check is a free tool created by the collaborative efforts of the non-profits Quill.org and CommonLit. AI Writing Check is a tool that was created to help teachers try to recognize writing created through the use of artificial intelligence. To use AI Writing Check you simply have to copy a passage of text of 100 or more words and paste it into AI Writing Check. The tool will then tell you the likelihood that the writing has or has not been created by artificial intelligence. That's all there is to it. AI Writing Check isn't foolproof and as is pointed out on the site, students can still develop ways to get around tools designed to detect AI-generated writing. It's also worth noting that it can't handle more than 400 words at a time.
Crossplag AI Content Detector is a free tool that you can use to try to determine whether or not an AI tool was used to generate a passage of text. Like other AI detection tools, Crossplag AI Content Detector is easy to use. To use it you simply paste a block of text into the content detector and it will give a rating of likelihood that AI was used to create that text.
There are many similarities between the two guides. There is one difference that's worth noting. The APA's guide includes a template for citing ChatGPT as an author. The MLA guide says not to treat generative AI tools like ChatGPT as an author.
Creating Quizzes With AI
QuestionWell is an AI tool that will generate reading comprehension and guiding questions for just about any article that you specify. Questions created by QuestionWell can be saved in a document or exported to a handful of popular quiz apps including Kahoot and Quizziz. QuestionWell takes the article that you've entered and generates a set of questions based on it. You can view all of the questions and select the ones that you like. The questions can be exported to a Word document and or exported to a quiz app. All of the question sets that you create are also saved in your QuestionWell account so that you can revisit them and edit them whenever you need to. Watch my video below for a short overview of how QuestionWell works.
Last week I wrote a blog post featuring the newly published historic map collection hosted by the Internet Archive. That collection, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, is the latest of the historic map collections that I've featured on this blog over the last fifteen years. Here are some others that I've featured and used in my own classrooms over the years.
Old Maps Online is an online map that you can browse and search to find historical maps to view online, to download, and to print. You can search the map by entering a location or you can just pan and zoom around the world to find historical maps. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Old Maps Online.
The Library of Congress housed hundreds of thousands of maps covering a huge array of topics from maps used by fire insurance companies to population density to maps of military battles and campaigns. The LOC's collection of maps of military battles and campaigns contains more than 4,000 maps that are free to view, download, and reuse. The vast majority of the maps are from the 18th and 19th centuries although there are about 600 maps covering World War I and II.
In this video I provide a short overview of the two places on the Library of Congress's website that I recommend students search and browse to find images and maps that they can use and reuse.
Map-based Lesson Plans
DocsTeach is one of my go-to resources for history teachers. DocsTeach provides thousands of primary sources that teachers can use to build online and in-person history lessons for middle school and high school students. Some of the pre-made lesson activities hosted on DocsTeach are based on maps. Some of those map-based lessons are:
Flickr's The Commons is a great place to find all kinds of interesting historical photographs from museums and libraries all over the world. The British Library's King's Topographical Collection hosted on The Commons 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.
topoView
topoView is a good place to find historical maps that you can import into Google Earth. topoView is a USGS website that provides historical maps dating back to 1880. You can download the maps in variety of file formats including JPG and KMZ. In the following video I demonstrate how to find and download historical maps on the topoView website.
Applications for Education
One of my favorite uses of Google Earth in history classes is overlaying historical maps on current map views. Doing that can provide students with context for places they read about in history lessons. Doing that also provides a good way to see how places change over time. Watch the video below to see how that's done.
Do you teach middle school or high school social studies classes? Have you ever had a student say to you, "Google has nothing on this" or "I can't find any information about this?"
If you answered "yes" to either of those questions, you'll want to join me for next Tuesday's webinar all about teaching search strategies to history students.
The live webinar will be at 7pm ET on May 2nd. You can ask me all the questions you like during the webinar. And if you can't make it to the live session, a recording will be emailed to you the next day.
Last week I shared directions for measuring perimeter and area in Google Earth. Doing that is one of many ways to incorporate Google Earth into mathematics lessons. Making that video prompted me to make a list of ways to use Google Earth and Maps (which has similar measuring tools) in mathematics lessons.
Here's my list of ideas for using Google Earth and Maps in mathematics lessons. The list is in no particular order other than how the ideas came into my mind.
Measuring perimeter of square, rectangular, and triangular pieces of land or buildings.
Measuring and calculating area.
Calculating land use for farming activities.
Calculating the area of a crop circle.
Identifying landing strips where airplanes of various sizes can safely land.
Planning a hiking trail and calculating elevation gain over the trail.
Planning a mountain biking trail.
Calculating the difference in walking time in real life versus what Google Maps calculates.
Mapping fire hydrant placement for a city.
Designing the spacing of houses in a sub development.
Obviously, I haven't filled in the details of all of these ideas. I'll do that in a future post.
In this week's Practical Ed Tech newsletter I made the case for using Google Scholar as part of your research process. In the newsletter I included a short video overview of Google Scholar features you should know how to use. That video is embedded below.
Use of Google Scholar is one of the many things that I cover in my new ebook, Teaching Search Strategies to History Students. You can get your copy right here.
Good morning from Maine where an overcast and relatively warm day awaits. I've put away our skis for the season. We're in biking mode now. But this weekend's forecast isn't conducive to much bike riding. So after playing with our puppy we're heading out to see a stage production of Moana today. I hope that you have something equally fun planned for the weekend.
If you'd like to have me speak at your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page.
Animated Explanations
Making and Teaching With Animated Explanations is a five-part, self-paced course that teaches you how to make a variety of animations. More importantly, it teaches you why making animations is a valuable and fun classroom activity for students of all ages.
The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
My YouTube channel has more than 45,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools.
If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.
Earlier this week I listed the educational technology topics that I'm still passionate about after all these years. One of those topics is search strategies and discovery tools for students. To that end, I've recently updated my e-book on Teaching Search Strategies to History Students.
In my updated e-book Teaching Search Strategies to History Students I outline activities that you can use in middle school and high school classrooms (grades 5-12). When you purchase a copy of the e-book you can use the activities exactly as written (you have permission to use the images I've included) or modify them to meet your students' needs.
I wrote Teaching Search Strategies to History Students to help you help your students go beyond the first page of search results. To that end, I provide guidance on using search tools and databases that students often overlook. These include tools like Google Scholar's patent and court search, Get The Research, and myriad of online archives and databases.
Buy your copy by May 1st and you'll be able to join me for a live webinar on May 2nd in which I'll dive into strategies in the e-book and answer your questions.
Even though it was acquired by Spotify a few years ago, Anchor.fm remained it's own platform until March of this year. Back in March Anchor was renamed Spotify for Podcasters.
Spotify for Podcasters makes it incredibly easy to record, edit, and publish a podcast. You can do all of your recording and editing within the Spotify for Podcasters website. A library of music clips and sounds is provided for you to use as bumper music.
The best part is that Spotify for Podcasters takes care of all of the steps needed to publish your podcast to all of the major podcast networks include Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
Watch my video below for a demonstration of how to use Spotify for Podcasters to create a podcast.
Even though the cold and rainy weather we're experiencing here in Maine makes it feel like summer is a long way off, it's not. I was reminded of this yesterday afternoon when I got my first email of the spring in which someone asked for advice about making an end-of-year video for her grade six class.
I get emails about this topic every spring and I'm always happy to help because it's fun to summarize and celebrate the school year in a short audio slideshow video. These are the tools that I'm recommending for that purpose this spring.
Adobe Express Video Adobe Express was previously known as Adobe Spark. I've been using it since its launch seven or eight years ago. Adobe Creative Cloud Express makes it easy for students to create succinct audio slideshow videos. It includes a library of background music that you can insert into your videos. Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud Express is a collaborative tool so you can invite a colleague to work on developing an end-of-year slideshow video with you. Watch this video to learn how to make a video with Adobe Creative Cloud Express.
Canva Canva offers two ways to create audio slideshow videos. The first way is to simply put together a series of slides and then select a soundtrack to play in the background. That process is demonstrated here. The other method is to use Canva's full video editor to add narration and custom timings to an audio slideshow video. That process is demonstrated in this video.
Microsoft Photos Microsoft Photos includes a video creation tool for making short audio slideshow-style videos. You'll find this by just opening the native photos app in Windows 10. Within the editor there are tools for adding animated effects to still images, insert your existing video clips into a video project, and tools for adding audio to your video. There's also a great option to search for Creative Commons licensed images and insert them directly into your video project. The best part of that feature is that attribution information is automatically added onto the images you choose through the built-in search tool. In the following video I provide a demonstration of how to create a video in Microsoft Photos in Windows 10.
Google Photos
In Google Photos there is a section called "utilities." It is in the utilities section that you'll find the video creation tool. To use it all you need to do is select up to 50 pictures and or videos that you have stored in your Google Photos account. Google Photos will then automatically select display length for each image or video and automatically add background music to your video. If you don't like what was automatically selected for your video, you can manually adjust display length and choose different background music.
Watch this short video to learn how to make an audio slideshow video with Google Photos.
The video creation tool in Google Photos does limit you to 50 images per video. If you need to make a longer video, you could make two or three videos in Google Photos then download them and combine them in iMovie or WeVideo.
About a month ago I got a new MacBook Air. It has been about a decade since I last used a Mac as my primary computer.
One of the things that I'm constantly reminded of while using my MacBook Air is the need to clear stuff off of the desktop. As you might guess, I take a lot of screenshots for work. Out of habit, I send them to my desktop to make it easy to find them while I'm working. But they do fill the desktop screen quickly. At the end of the day I drag them all to the trash.
Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because I looked in my trash bin yesterday evening and saw that I had more than 100 items in it. I quickly emptied it.
Why does that matter? Because the trash bin, the downloads folder, and the documents folders are places that are often full of files we no longer need. And while holding onto miscellaneous screenshots and documents probably won't hinder your computer's performance to a notable level, those same folders when filled with video files, high resolution photos, and large GIS files certainly could. So make it a habit to empty the trash and other folders that have files you don't need on your computer anymore.
Google Earth is a tool that people often think of as being something that's only useful for social studies lessons. However, there are many areas in which Google Earth is useful. One of those areas is in elementary school and middle school math lessons.
Within the web version of Google Earth there is an easy-to-use tool for measuring distances long and short. You can use this tool to quickly measure a distance between two places, to measure perimeter, and to measure area. In the short video that is embedded below I demonstrate how to measure perimeter and area in Google Earth.
On a related note, completing my Around the World With Google Earth activity is a great way for students to learn how to use Google Earth and to create Google Earth projects.
As I'm sure many of you do, I often play the role of "tech support person" for friends and family. That was the case a few days ago when a friend of mine who owns a local, small business asked for help with Google Calendar.
My friend wanted a quick and easy way for his one and only employee to view a list of upcoming appointments and deadlines. My suggestion was to simply create a shared Google Calendar.
When I taught a PC repair class that took in external projects, I created a shared Google Calendar so that my students could see when we took in a project, when parts would be available, and when we estimated to return the computer to the user.
Over the weekend a reader reached out to me for help with Google Forms. Specifically, he wanted to know how to impose a time limit on a Google Form. I was happy to help.
The method that I use to impose a time limit on Google Forms is to enable the Google Forms add-on called FormLimiter. With this add-on installed you can set a time at which a form automatically stops accepting responses. You can also use FormLimiter to impose a limit on the number of responses that a form will accept. Watch my video below to see how it works.
Yesterday morning I shared a collection of more than 100,000 historic maps for classroom use. In that post I mentioned using those maps to create digital overlays on current maps. Google Earth provides a couple of ways to do that. Felt.com is another digital mapping tool that can be used for the same purpose.
In the following videos I demonstrate how to create historic map overlays for comparison purposes.
There are a couple of ways to overlay historical maps on current maps in Google Earth. The first is to simply use the Rumsey Historical Maps collection layer in Google Earth. That method is demonstrated here. The other method is to find a historic map, download it, then use it as an image overlay in Google Earth. That method is demonstrated here.
It's a bit of an understatement to say that the rapid growth of AI-powered writing and drawing tools is raising many questions for teachers and students. One of those frequently asked questions is "how do you cite ChatGPT?"
There are many similarities between the two guides. There is one difference that's worth noting. The APA's guide includes a template for citing ChatGPT as an author. The MLA guide says not to treat generative AI tools like ChatGPT as an author.
If you haven't yet tried ChatGPT or Google Bard, watch the videos below to see how they work.
Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Source 1. Source 2.
In this week's Practical Ed Tech Newsletter I mentioned that digital mapping tools is one of the areas of educational technology that I'm still passionate about after sixteen years and 17,000 blog posts. And making comparisons through the use of overlays is one of my favorite digital mapping activities to do with students.
Parts of the David Rumsey Historical Map collection has been available in the desktop version of Google Earth for quite a while. Recently, almost the entire collection was made available on the Internet Archive. Today, there are 111,792 items from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection cataloged on the Internet Archive.
The vast majority of the maps that are available in the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection on the Internet Archive are Creative Commons licensed. That means you can download them and use them for non-commercial purposes provided that you provide proper attribution.
Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Source 1. Source 2.
Applications for Education
Even if you don't create overlays with the historical maps in the collection, you can still use these maps for comparison purposes. One simple activity that you can do is to download one of the historical maps and have students try to identify what's different about the historical map compared to the contemporary view of the world. For example, the map at the top of this post is of the United States in 1880. I'd ask my U.S. History students to try to identify which states are missing from that map compared to the fifty states today. You could do a similar activity in a European history class by using the 1939 map that I've included in the center of this blog post.
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