Thing 16: Mapping & Geolocation Tools

For this Thing, I looked at 3 tools: Google Earth Tour Builder, National Geographic Interactive Mapmaker, and UMapper. I've done some summer curriculum work with my 2nd grade team so that we can kick off a project-based unit on community/local history, so I wanted to explore some tools that would help our students learn about maps, explore the geography and surroundings of Trumansburg, and allow us to add content generated by both students and staff. In addition, I've done some side work this summer with a teacher from Chicago who is developing a similar unit, so we spent some time talking through these tools.

I played around with building a tour of Trumansburg in each tool. I abandoned National Geographic Interactive Mapmaker pretty quickly. It looks great and is easy to use, and I like the fact that you can overlay different maps (wildlife habitats, economy, weather), but it wasn't the tool for this project. You can add placemarks and text, but not photos. Also, it simply doesn't offer a close enough view of our little town--I couldn't zoom in fully without getting the "no data"grid. I'm sure it's different for major metropolitan areas, though. So this one goes on the shelf for another time. It may work for that middle school unit on water scarcity.

I liked UMapper a bit better. It's also easy to use, you can add pictures as well as text to the placemarks, and you can lock in the view so that viewers stay on the area you want. You can also add audio, which is a nice feature. This is a front runner for the project. I like the ability to draw on the map, so students could mark it up--find their houses, try to define the town's boundaries, trace their route to school. I think that second graders could use it with just a bit of coaching. Here's my map of Trumansburg:




I think that my favorite, though, is Google Earth Tour Builder. It was a bit of a headache at first. The 3D version won't run on Chrome! This has to do with the fact that Chrome doesn't allow the necessary plugin. The 3D version will work on Firefox, but I need something that will work on our Chromebooks. I had to do some fiddling around to actually sign in--it kept giving me an error message, but finally accepted my school account. From there, I could build a tour in the older, 2d version. I like Tour Builder for several reasons. Dropping placemarks is easy, and you can add up to 25 photos, and even record a video to add to the tour. Google integration means that you can add photos from your own Drive. When you play the tour, it zips you around from place to place (though I didn't zoom in much for my tour, so it's kind of static)--I like this feature a lot. This was the only tool that allows users to play the tour. You can't mark up the map like you can with UMapper, but I could see using both tools for the project--Tour Builder as a way to do a preliminary tour of the town, then UMapper to mark up a map and make a sort of working copy,  and maybe Tour Builder again as a final presentation tool once students have taken pictures of sites around town. You can find my tour of Trumansburg here. 

I so enjoy playing with maps! I think I will end up incorporating some of these tools into the 4th grade social studies units on mapping and New York State history. My 5th graders also do projects on U.S. history/geography, Latin America, and Canada, and I think that the teachers will enjoy these tools.