How to Map Spreadsheet Data on Felt

Felt is a multimedia mapping tool that I started using late last year and it has quickly become one of my favorite mapping tools. With Felt you can create everything some simple directions maps to maps that have historic overlays to maps of animal migrations and much more. The latest update to Felt makes it easy to quickly create a map from a spreadsheet. 

In your Felt account you can upload a CSV or Excel file and have the data within the spreadsheet distributed as placemarks and or polygons on a map. After the data is initially loaded you can then customize the design of your map by altering the color, size, and shape of the placemarks and polygons. You can also customize the size and color of the labels on your map after the spreadsheet data has been imported onto your map. Watch my video below to learn how to display your spreadsheet data on a Felt map. 

Video - How to Map Spreadsheet Data on Felt

Applications for Education

Mapping spreadsheet data is a great way for students to see the distribution of people, animals, and plants in a state, province, country, or region. A tool like Google's Dataset Search is a good place to find spreadsheets that students can then import into Felt to create a map. 

StatWorld - Interactive Maps of Development Data

StatSilk's StatWorld contains more than 400 world maps of data on topics in economics, education, health, environment, the digital divide, and much more. You can explore the maps by selecting a data set and then a display format. You can also choose to display the data for all countries or only the countries that you wish to compare.

Applications for Education
StatWorld could be a good tool to have students use to compare the economic development of countries and regions. Have students compare data sets from multiple categories and ask them to try to develop cause and effect relationships between the data sets. For example, can they find a connection between the duration of compulsory education and GDP per capita?