Title:
MapMaker Interactive.
Summary: MapMaker is, as the name
indicates, an interactive mapmaker based on information by the National
Geographic. You can situate yourself anywhere on Earth, zoom in to look at
individual countries or zoom out to have a continent in your map window. You
can also full size the map window to have a larger canvas to work on.
Ease of Use: The tools on the website
are easy to use, but as mentioned in the Skill
Set section you will have to know the terminology for it to be effective. A
student will have to have minimal skills of drag-and-drop as well as free-form
drawing with a cursor.
There is a static image tutorial but it’s easily missed as the icon is
very small (although situated in the top, right corner where I would usually go
look for Help). There is no feedback
on the content you put in, as it is a mapmaking tool and the content is
therefore up to the user. The tool gives you a label when you hover over an
icon, as well as on the map when you’re trying to put something on it or move
things (“Click and Drag on a marker if you want to move it”)
Skill Set: The MapMaker is available
under the Teacher-tab on the National Geographic’s website. For the web to be
useful you will have to have a substantial prior knowledge in the terminology
of social studies, mostly geography and maps, but also culture and economy.
Therefore the targeted audience would be for students over 10 years of
age, in social science classes, but there is really no age limit as the user
can make any kind of maps they like, with the content they want. As long as the
instructor explains what they can do with the map (and maybe sticks to one or
two tabs of icons) the students could possibly be younger than 10.
Program Design Features:
Simple “yes or no” answers”
Control of Pace
- Yes
Reviews/Help
- Yes
Ability to Backtrack
-
Yes
Levels of Difficulty
-
Yes/No (it goes with the content)
Physical Interface
-
No
Speech Features
- No
Childproof - Yes
Individual Use
- Yes
Use with Pairs/Small
Groups
- Yes
Printer Use
- Yes
Test/Recordkeeping/Game
Save feature – Yes (you can download a map you’re working on and then open it
again through the website)
Add-on Option-Can
incorporate user content - Yes
Scaffolding - No
Program Comments: The MapMaker is a tool that’s used by teachers that
want to have their students work with an interactive map. The objective is to
get students to think off maps as something you can work with, change and
explore, not as fixed entities that they have no control over. It is very
detailed and based on a lot of data about the planet, from satellite pictures
to information about the sea, terrain and nations.
Problem Solving
Skills: This
software has many elements of
problem solving and they are limited only
by the activity the teacher assigns. These are the problem solving skills that
I could identify by using the tool only:
- Multiple solutions- Multiple strategies
- Identifying relationships
- Gathering information- discerning what is important information
- Filtering and assigning relevance to data and information
- Organizing information
- Interpreting data
- Scanning for clues
- Stimulate imaginative thinking
- Ability to explore
- Identification of patterns and sequence
- Synthesize into graphic representation of a concept-visualizing data
Fun Factor: As with so many other
open-ended tools it depends on the assignment and understanding how enjoyable
the tool is and how long students will last. I believe that the tool has many
possibilities in the classroom.
Supplementary
Materials: There
are several supplemental links on the National Geographic website along with
the interactive map. One is the MapMaking kit where
you can print out maps in A4 standard paper size to be put on the floor or the
wall. Other is a list of activities you can use in the classroom. The
activities already have a description, links to the maps needed along with
basic information a teacher must have for a successful activity. One of those
activities is the Geography of a Pencil.
Activity:
There are many activities that can use an open-ended tool like the
interactive MapMaker. The following example describes a social studies class in
Iceland where one of the subjects is to learn about the people that emigrated
from Iceland to Canada at the end of the 19th century. This activity
is supposed to be done before the students work on an interactive map
about the journey from Iceland to Canada.
Time: 3x 40 minutes (can be
longer if the teacher wants them to expand the activity to a written assignment
as well).
Age: 13-14 year olds.
Goal: Students put themselves in
the position of people that had to make a decision to leave their home for an
unknown future.
Material needed: Newspapers, a couple of
green, blue and brown cloths, and construction paper in different Earth colors.
Backstory:
Famine resulting from hard winters and volcano eruptions, along with
land being sparse, made many people think about a better life in another
country. It’s estimated that about 14.000 Icelandic people (25% of the nation
at that time) immigrated to Canada between 1870 and 1914. Families had to make
a decision to stay or leave for the unknown, knowing that they might never come
back and some might die on the way.
Activity:
The students put themselves in the position of families that all live
in the same fjord on the North East coast of Iceland (3-4 students in each
family). They start by crushing all the newspapers into a pile that looks like
a U, placing the green and brown cloths over it and the blue ones in the
middle. This will be their fjord.
The students group themselves into families (or the teacher does it),
naming their character and deciding what occupation they have. The family can
have more family members than the number of students in each group. Usually one
of the families will be the owner of all the land in the fjord, making the
other families their tenants. That does not mean that life isn’t hard for them.
Using the cardboard paper the students make houses, animals, boats and
their families. This is not supposed to be very detailed and it’s actually enough
for the students to bend a piece of paper in half to represent a house (that stands
like an A). Students can represent people and animals by ripping little pieces
of paper and placing them by the house.
After the “stage” is set the students tell the class about their
families. They learn that a ship is leaving in the summer for Canada and are
given the options of staying or going, having the possibility of leaving some
family members behind. After each family has reached a decision they have to
explain their reasoning to the class. In some cases a family member might stay
behind, e.g. younger children and elderly people being placed in the care of
other families in the fjord.
When every group has gotten a chance to explain their rational they get
to throw a dice. If the dice shows the numbers 1-4 their character makes it
safely across the Atlantic, but if they get a 5 or a 6 they either die on the
way or soon after arriving to Canada.
