Internet sites: time is the essence

Image above: Students exploring  some of the great sites on the Internet for the teaching of humanities.

Related links
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog
GeogSplace blog
Geographical thinking Scoop.it
Spatial literacy Scoop.it
History and geography Scoop.it
Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:
manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I?? Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'



So much, so little time!

I recently came across a listing of top sites for humanities educators from a site called GoEd http://www.goedonline.com/

 I have edited the sites listed to be mainly relevant to geography teachers (but have included some sites which would be useful for teaching historical geography. All we need as teachers is the time to get familiar with each of these sites and we certainly would be having some creative teaching going on.

Web 2.0 Tools

Poll Everywhere
An inexpensive and quick alternative for clicker response systems. Create your first poll in 30 seconds without having to sign up. Your students simply text their answer to a predetermined number and, voila! Poll Anywhere is free if your class size is less than 40 students.

Animoto
Use Animoto to easily create presentations and videos with your own images and music, or choose from a library of stock files. Teachers can apply for a free Animoto Plus account.

Wikispaces
With a free option for K-12 teachers, Wikispaces is a great tool for making custom webpages that your students can edit together. You can manage privacy settings, create student accounts without email addresses, embed media and even customize the design of your Wiki pages.

Voicethread
Voicethread’s group conversations are stored and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world. It allows you to create multimedia slideshows with images, videos and documents. Others can view the slides and then leave text, audio or video comments.

Prezi
Prezi is a really neat cloud-based presentation program that allows you to zoom in and out. If you don’t mind your slides being public, you can sign up for a free account with 100MB of storage.

IMDb
Use IMDb, the internet movie database, to see if there are any movies that are relevant to the topic you’re teaching. If you find one, you can also check the rating to make sure it’s appropriate for your classroom.

Quizlet
As one of the largest and most popular flashcard creation websites around, Quizlet allows students and teachers to customize their own “sets” of flashcards. You can manage access to the flashcards you create and share them with your students.

SlideShare
SlideShare is one of the most popular ways to upload and share PowerPoint presentations and other documents. Again, this is a great tool for transferring documents between your home and school computer without having to carry around a flash drive.

ClassMarker
ClassMarker is an online quiz and test creation website. As an educator, you get 100 free tests taken (and graded!) per month.

Informational Resources

CIA Factbook
The CIA World Factbook contains information on the communications, economy, geography, government, history, military, people, transnational issues and transportation for 267 world entities.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a simple search engine that specializes in scholarly literature. It allows you to search across many sources including articles, books, court opinions, online repositories, university libraries and more.

Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is searchable database of information about government, historical events, political figures, important documents and more.

Current Events

Google News Archive

Time Magazine

New York Times

Newseum
View today’s front page from more than 800 newspapers worldwide. Use this website to demonstrate how different cultures can perceive the same event.

Cagle
A daily compilation of editorial cartoons from around the world that cover current issues and important figures.

Clay Bennett Cartoons Archive
Modern cartoons on a range of topics including individual liberties, global warming, lobby reform, congress and more.

Interactive Timelines

Timerime
Search for pre-made, media-rich timelines or make your own using MP3 audio clips, YouTube videos and more.

X Timeline
Another website that makes it easy to create and share timelines with pictures and videos.

Time Toast
All you need is a valid email address to create interactive timelines that can be shared anywhere on the web.

Tiki Toki
Easily create stunning web-based, sharable timelines with images and video. Tiki Toki also has a group editing feature for collaboration.

Dipity
With Dipity, you can find, create and embed interactive, customizable timelines.

Capzles
Create your own sharable timeline with images, video, audio, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint and PDF files.


Printable Maps and Mapping Tools

ScribbleMaps
Easily draw on Google Maps and then share with your students or post to your teacher blog.

QuickMaps
QuickMap’s slogan is “Doodle on Google!” It’s another free and easy way to draw on Google Maps.

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
High-quality historic, thematic and topographic maps of the world including Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia/Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Polar regions, Oceans and United States.

Printable World Maps
Free printable maps of the world’s countries. Each map is a blank outline.

Nat Geo Education: Mapping
Free, printable 1-page maps, printable large-format maps and an online interactive student map.

Mapping History
Animated socio and political maps of 18th and 19th century United States, Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Animaps
Animaps letting you create maps with markers that move, images and text that pop up on cue, and lines and shapes that change over time. Your finalized Animap appears like a video that can be played, paused, slowed down and sped up.

BBC Dimensions
This website takes important places and events, and overlays them onto a map. Just type in a zip code. Use it to show your students how large something like the Great Wall of China or the battle of Stalingrad really is/was!

Beyond colouring in! Creative Geography teaching

Image above: A luminescent map of the World's earthquakes since 1898. A century's worth of earthquakes (a staggering 203,186 of them) across the globe.

Related links
Geogaction
Spatialworlds website
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Humsteach blog
GeogSplace blog

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:
manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'


Teaching geography creatively (not just busy work!)

The following sites are some useful sites for teaching geography creatively, many of which are excellent for introductory geography in the primary school. These sites provide amazing opportunties to do some really meaningful and worthwhile geographical studies in the classroom, learning we could not imagine before the wonders of technology, including spatial. Many of the sites I have gleaned from Larry Ferlazzo, a teacher in the US who continues to post some great teaching resources on his edublog.

* Share Geography: A site with heaps of great activities for teaching geography from the earliest years upwards.

* 101 Creatively simple ways to teach Geography: Some great activities and ideas from Tony Cassidy in the UK.

* Top Geography blogs with heaps of ideas for the classroom

* Geographical Media is the newest addition to The Best Tools To Help Develop Global Media Literacy list. After you register (which is a free and easy process) you can see which topics are being covered in the news media in different parts of the world, and compare the differences. The site seems to have a number of other features — and it’s not particularly intuitive how to navigate through them — but the site has a lot of potential.

* Map Battle is a very easy-to-use tool to create geography games online. It’s like a less-fancy The Traveler IQ Challenge game.

*  Newsy is a site that — in short videos — compares how major news events are covered by media throughout the world. In some ways, it’s similar to Link TV, which is also of use in the classroom.

* The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”. The speaking is pretty fast and relatively high-level, so it’s probably only accessible to advanced English Language Learners.

* Hypercities is a neat “mashup” of what various cities have looked like over the past several hundred years. By using a “slider,” you can choose a year, and then various images of that city from that time are shown.

* Safe Drinking Water, a site developed by the Academy of Sciences to highlight worldwide water issues. It has several good videos that are closed-captions, along with an atlas showing which countries have less or more access to water resources.

* Geobeats. It has a huge collection of short travel videos from around the world.

* What The World Eats, an online slideshow from Time magazine that shows families from fifteen different countries, along with what they eat during one week and its cost. This site can be used to initiate a discussion on economic inequities; use in compare/contrast activities; and take advantage of it to develop new vocabulary.

* Places Of A Lifetime. It highlights major cities from all over the world sharing information, images, and videos. It also has short and simple quizzes users can take.

* Mapdango, a “mash-up” — a combination of a variety of web applications. It’s a neat geographical and map search engine that, after you enter the location you’re interested in, will show you the area’s weather, areas of interest from Wikipedia, Flickr photos, and other items. One particularly useful feature is that it shows all of the above connected to its geographical location on a map, too.

* Visual Geography is a nice site with images, information, and quizzes about 85 countries around the world. I A feature called “Compare” allows you to pick any two countries and easily compare their demographic data with a click of the mouse.

* McDougal Littell’s Class Zone. This site has animated maps, online activities, animations — all with text support for audio. Just click on a subject and a state, and you’ll be amazed at what they offer online.

* Maps: Finding Our Place In The World Wonderful online activities it offers are too numerous to mention. Just be sure to explore all the links on its “sidebar.”

* Geography Challenge from a magazine called Mental Floss. It has a series of good map games that are a little more challenging than the ones on IKnowThat.

* Nations Illustrated. It has over 7,000 photos from all over the world. They’re categorized by country, and they’re free to use for non-commercial purposes.

* The Zero Footprint Kids Calculator  It would be difficult to develop a more accessible web tool for people to figure out their own ecological footprint.

* The Virtual Smithsonian. It’s a fantastic multimedia window into the artifacts, and their stories, held by the Smithsonian Institution.