A New Look at the World

Recently I came across a blog post online featuring 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World from A Sheep No More. The topics range from where Google Street Level view is available to countries not invaded by Britain and time zones in Antarctica to the highest paid public employee in each state. Obviously, you can find information on just about anything in map form on this post.

So, how can you use this in the classroom?

  1. "World Map of Earthquakes Since 1898": You could have your students research the areas with the most reported earthquakes. The science-related perspective is obvious. But what about the economic? If you look at the areas most prone to earthquakes, can you draw any sort of conclusions about what earthquakes are doing to the economies in that area?
  2. "Worldwide Map of Oil Import And Export Flows": Looking at where the US (or another area in the world) gets their oil from, how are the political relations between those areas? Look at a region and pay attention to who they export the most to. Why might that be?
  3. "The 7000 Rivers that Feed into the Mississippi River": Randomly chose a city in one of the states with a river that feeds the Mississippi. From a math point of view, how fast would you get to the Gulf of Mexico from that city given traveling by a certain water transportation method? The students would need to first trace where they'd  have to go, figure out the estimated length, etc. From a social studies perspective, what cities or towns would they pass along the way that would be worth stopping at and why? Create a sales pitch to convince people to stop there versus other towns. The science aspect of this one is pretty easy to think about.
  4. "Worldwide Annual Coffee Consumption Per Capita": For a health classroom, what are the health effects of coffee and caffeine in general? Knowing that, what can you hypothesize about the health of the top consumers (and those on the bottom of the list)? After researching those countries, are you right? Wrong? How so?
  5. "Earth’s Population by Latitude and Longitude": From a cultural and science prospective, what kind of conclusions can you conclude about what draws people to the most (or least) popular latitudes and longitudes?
With 35 other maps, this post could become super long very quickly. Obviously these maps can be the foundation for a vast range of thought engaging and real life research projects. See a map that catches your eye, but want help figuring out what you could do with it? Let me know! I have a ton of ideas to toss out to you if you want them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empowering Students with Choice Boards

Image
An example of a student choice menu that has students chose one item from each "course". I've been working with a teacher lately who has struggled with her students completing a summative paper in her class. This trimester, we're working together to find a way to increase buy in and hopefully have a higher percentage of students complete the project. While investigating options for her, the first thing that came to mind was using a choice board or learning menu to enable her students to select the method that would work best for them rather than prescribing a multimedia project. There are a wide range of ways that you can put choice boards in to action. Tic-Tac-Toe, Menus, Choice Board... there are lots of different words to use to search for them. But the premise for all of them is the same. Give your students a selection of options to chose from and let them go with it. Beyond hopefully boosting engagement, the teacher gets the added benefit of not have a ga
Read more

How fast are you? Ok, how fast is your internet??

With a week left in October, it'd be awesome if we got more teachers (and students) at our schools to click on the link in the message below to do a free one minute SchoolSpeedTest! It only takes a minute and we'd love to get more data. Thank you for your help! As we continue our October SpeedTest Month, we'd like to thank all of you that have participated in the School Speed Tests.  So far, we have had over 60% of Maine districts take part, with some schools performing over 150 tests so far!  However, we still have some districts and schools that have yet to take part.  The good news is that there is still plenty of time to do so!  All we're asking is that each school in your district perform 10-20 tests before the end of the month! As a reminder, participating schools will receive SchoolSpeedTest data that will help find network bottlenecks, support network planning, demonstrate the need for increased connectivity/hardware funding and support your district readin
Read more

Backwards Educational Technology Flowchart

Image
I think by now every who has followed this blog knows that I take in a TON of information each day in hopes of finding you information that I deem to be useful to pass along to make your day easier. I feel a bit like a clearing house in that regard. Many have told me that technology is awesome, but that it is so hard to determine what tool to use and when not to mention learn how to use it. Fortunately for you, that's pretty much my job (so use me!). In a recent summary of links from the Diigo education group, a member had posted a link to Katie M. Ritter's Backwards EdTech Flowchart. Once I read her post, which you can read by clicking here , I knew that I had to pass along her flowchart to you guys, too. The basic premise of her flowchart is simple: decide what you want to do and the flowchart will help guide you to the tool you could use (including links to all of them). It's a pretty well thought out flowchart and especially useful for those of you who are just starti
Read more