Maps Engine: Interactively meeting benchmarks: From Two Moons, Africa, and Civil War Battles

Google Maps Engine Lite can help you create advanced custom maps to share with collaborators and also publish to the web.  Students can build many different digital contents into each map point such as photos, YouTube videos and student writing. Click here to read Eric's observation of students working on a project in Mr. Clifton's classroom.

Link to Africa unit Rubric, project planning sheet from Clifton's website.  

Link to Student Africa Map 

Mr. Clifton's Testimonial 

Maps Engine Lite vidcast showing student examples and literature tour, Two Moons idea.   

Maps Engine Lite Tutorial, including importing of Civil War Battles   

Africa unit project - interactive map building

I visited Mr. Clifton's 8th grade geography class for the end of 3rd hour and the beginning of 4th today. They are beginning their final assessment for their Africa unit. Mr. Clifton was willing to do something different with the unit project and offered to develop and new project starting with the rubric from his previous project for this unit. 

Link to Africa unit Rubric, project planning sheet from Clifton's website.  

Students are to create a dream Africa trip, stopping in at least 10 places during the trip. Me. Clifton wanted students to be able to add multimedia and written responses for each of the 10 locations. Google Map Engine came across as a great way for students to create the maps, as his students have access to a chromebook cart for checkout. It's basically a Google map that you can collaborate and build many different digital contents into each map point such as photos, YouTube videos and student writing. Students did not have any hesitations getting started with the online map tool. 

Students were logged into Chromebooks during the initial explanation of the project, as Mr. Clifton linked the rubric and planning Google doc to his webpage - not to say that this project couldn't be done if you don't have a webpage! 

I am excited to see some of the maps as students get more into building some of the content!

30 second tip to share with staff:

Reopen closed tab on chrome.