There are many technology projects your students can do to review the Virginia Regions: a video, a website, a rap, a Keynote slideshow, or even a comic. Today in fourth grade at Chamberlayne Elementary, we made interactive maps online. There are many free sites for creating maps, but here’s what we found when we tried out three of them. A really cool one by National Geographic is called MapMaker. Your students can draw on maps, measure distances, add symbols, and see overlays with interesting data like population and climate. However, we couldn’t get it to load in class. So next we tried AniMaps which also lets you draw on maps and add symbols, but we found it was too complicated for the students, and had some glitches like panning and zooming too rapidly. At last we had success with ScribbleMaps. The students were able to draw the regions on the map, add labels, and search a huge library of symbols to show the products and industries of the regions. What I like best about it is that it gives two links for saving. One allows you to go back and edit it (using a password instead of a login). The other link is for simply sharing your map. I included both links on a GoogleDoc with all the student maps. You can see that by clicking here. Take a look at a student sample, and notice that you can zoom in and out and click on the symbols. It was a great way for the students to review the regions!

One of the great things about using Google Apps in the classroom is that students can collaborate on the same document at the same time. So partners could be writing in a Google Doc, entering data into a Google Spreadsheet, or making a Google Slideshow… together, even if they aren’t in the same class, or the same school! Today Ms. Lizotte’s fifth graders at Chamberlayne Elementary created a collaborative Google Map for their “Amazing Mail Race” project. Earlier this year they sent out letters to schools all over the USA and waited to see which schools replied. Here at the end of the year, they wanted to see all the different states where they received mail from displayed in one big map. So each student was assigned a letter/state to plot on the map. They chose an icon, marked the state, and wrote their name and where the letter was from. Then we embedded the map into a website created with CheckThis. You can see the website by clicking here. The map is interactive so be sure to click on the icons and zoom out, because they even received mail from as far away as Alaska! You could adapt this activity to your class by making collaborative maps about the explorers or Civil War battles or whatever else you are studying that can be displayed on a map. Let me know how I can help!