Google Map Skills

Google maps has a few great features that help in teaching map skills to students of all disabilities.  Google still is the best (in my opinion) for getting directions, but they have a great feature called My Maps, which you can use to create your own customized maps.

Head to http://maps.google.com and log into your Google account.  You'll see a link on the left side for "My Places", click and then select create new map.  You can then find the area you'd like to work in and start placing pins on the map.  A great feature is that you can change the look of any push pin after you place it.  Just click on the pin in the edit screen and you have a large assortment of map type symbols.  Many of these symbols are perfect for teaching how to read a map, and use a legend.  Once you've placed them all you can print the map and the legend will print too.

As you can see from the map above I customized mine to include places in our downtown, and we used the map to take a walking trip.  It was a great way to familiarize ourself with the area!  I even added a compass rose to the map after printing so that we could talk about directions while walking.  Really adds to the community experience.


- Patrick

Share this
Do you know somebody else who would find this post interesting or useful? Please forward it to them. Did somebody forward this post to you? Visit Teaching All Students and subscribe to receive posts for free. If you need a tutorial please visit this post: RSS Readers

MapTrot

Robert Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers shared a great site for maps, Maptrot.  It uses Google Maps, and allows you to input multiple points of interest.  For me, I can see using this with students to see where multiple points of a community based trip are located in relation to each other.   It can also be used as part of social science lessons. It's a very easy to use site.  Most maps can be created in less than 5 min.



Patrick


Share this
Do you know somebody else who would find this post interesting or useful? Please forward it to them. Did somebody forward this post to you? Visit Teaching All Students and subscribe to receive posts for free. If you need a tutorial please visit this post: RSS Readers

VoiceThread

Lately several people on Twitter and other blogs have been talking about Voicethread.com. Voicethread is a simple slideshow viewer, but at the same time it's so much more than that. Voicethread allows you to upload your photos, rearrange them, and create a great looking slideshow. The added feature is you can add comments to each of the slides. Once you share your Voicethread you can invite people to view it, then they can make comments on the show too. Voicethreads are completely secure, unless you make them public.


I recently used Voicethread to share photos and comments for a community based instruction trip my class took. It was such a simple thing to do (took less than 10 min. to complete it), and the parents were so excited to see their children. I think this would be a wonderful tool to share curriculum materials with parents, create online social stories, or just a fun way for kids to share what they've learned.


You can sign up for a free account, educators can pay a one time fee of $10 for a K-12 account. They also have class & school accounts for a very reasonable price. Take a look a the K-12 pricing here. While the free account is great for most people, the Educator account allows you to export 3 movies per month for offline viewing. Check it out!




Patrick


Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons - username: clappstar


Share this
Do you know somebody else who would find this post interesting or useful? Please forward it to them. Did somebody forward this post to you? Visit Teaching All Students and subscribe to receive posts for free. f you need a tutorial please visit this post: RSS Readers