Late one night, while scrolling through social media, a video from JoseMonkey appeared in my feed. JoseMonkey, who does not publicly use his real name and describes himself as a geoinfluencer, has built a substantial following by solving geolocation challenges submitted by viewers. In a typical video, someone records what appears to be an ordinary location and challenges him to find them. Often there are no famous landmarks, no readable street signs, and few obvious clues. Yet through a combination of observation, queries, research, and geographic reasoning, JoseMonkey is often able to identify the exact location.

While the videos are entertaining, these also serve a broader purpose. JoseMonkey frequently reminds viewers that seemingly harmless details in photos and videos can reveal far more information than people realize, including where they live, work, or spend their time. (An additional lesson about data privacy and cybersecurity is in here!)

I was initially drawn in by the challenge, but after watching several videos, I realized that the real appeal lay in the process. An ordinary scene becomes a puzzle, and every object, shadow, building, and feature of the landscape has the potential to become a clue.

But the popularity of JoseMonkey's videos reveals something important about geography, a subject that is often misunderstood in schools. Many adults remember geography as a collection of maps, capitals, and place names that had to be memorized for a test. While factual knowledge certainly has value, that narrow view overlooks what makes the discipline so powerful. Geography is fundamentally about understanding relationships between people and places, interpreting patterns in the natural and built environment, and making sense of the world through investigation.

JoseMonkey's work offers a compelling demonstration of these skills in action. In one challenge, an ordinary mailbox became the starting point for an inquiry when he researched where similar designs were commonly used, eventually narrowing the search to Taiwan. In another, details such as municipal infrastructure, license plates, and vegetation helped identify locations in Turin, Ontario, and North Carolina. Individually, these clues seem insignificant; the value emerges through context and the ability to connect small observations into a larger geographic story.

Locating Critical Thinking

JoseMonkey succeeds because he presents geography as a mystery to solve rather than a collection of facts to remember.

Viewers are invited to follow the clues, consider possibilities, test assumptions, and watch the investigation unfold–skills that involve critical thinking. The challenge is not knowing every mailbox design, license plate, or tree species in the world, but recognizing which details might matter, researching possibilities, eliminating alternatives, and refining conclusions as new information emerges.

In many respects, the critical thinking process resembles detective work, except the clues are embedded in landscapes, infrastructure, architecture, and the countless details that shape our understanding of place. Much of the learning occurs during the investigation itself as participants explore possibilities, encounter dead ends, and gradually narrow the field of options, all of which translate well beyond the classroom.

For educators, geolocation challenges also offer a useful reminder about engagement. People are naturally drawn to problems that require investigation and discovery. Geography provides rich opportunities for this kind of learning, yet it is often reduced to memorization. When students analyze landscapes, interpret maps, examine settlement patterns, or explore relationships between human and environmental systems, they engage in the same habits of mind that make geolocation challenges so compelling.

‘Where Am I?’

Perhaps the larger lesson behind JoseMonkey's success is not about geography alone, but about learning itself. His videos demonstrate the power of curiosity-driven inquiry. At a time when answers are increasingly available with a quick search, the ability to observe carefully, ask thoughtful questions, evaluate evidence, and make sense of complex information remains essential. Geography provides an ideal vehicle for developing those habits because every place tells a story waiting to be investigated.

The continuing popularity of geolocation challenges suggests that people have not lost their appetite for discovery. If anything, these remind us that some of the most meaningful learning begins with a simple question: Where am I, and how can I figure it out?

GeoGuessr is an online game-based platform that uses maps and gamification to teach world geography to students.

Crucially, this is a game first and then a learning experience as a result of the content. Being built that way, it feels like something that is fun rather than an educational tool. However, it can work as exactly that for teachers, making for a useful way to get even less enthusiastic students to engage in learning geography. 

Easy to access, with free content, and super simple to use, this setup is great for a wide range of ages, but since it focuses on geographical knowledge it will likely best suit students from around the age of four or five and upward. That said, it can be fun for adults to try too.

So can GeoGuessr help teach in your classroom?

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What is GeoGuessr?

GeoGuessr is an online and app-based game that uses maps and a question-and-answer style scenario to challenge the geographical knowledge of students. While teaching them more at the same time.

The website itself is easy to access from nearly any device with a browser and an internet connection, although there are also app versions of this available for iOS and Android. The free initial access makes it a great option to try out without the need to commit.

The site uses a combination of Google Street View and Mapillary images to take students around the world while testing their knowledge. For example, a student may be placed near the Statue of Liberty and asked to place a pin on a map to show where they are in the world.

It's all very simple to do, making it easy to pick-up even for students that are less technologically able.

How does GeoGuessr work?

GeoGuessr starts you off on a map or Street View location. You are then encouraged to explore in order to determine where it is that you have virtually landed. This can mean looking around and taking in crucial details such as the local language, road signs, landmarks, topography, the environment, personal experiences, and more.

There is a small map in the bottom right corner in which you are encouraged to place a pin. This can be zoomed for even more accuracy when placing that pin. To use the Statue of Liberty example, you have a zoomed out map of New York but can zoom right in to Liberty Island to place your marker.

You are then shown the exact location of the spot you were in, next to the marker you placed. A measurement of how far out you were, in miles, is shown to denote how well you've done. This is also shown in points, which you accrue across the several missions you're given before being given a final score at the end.

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What are the best GeoGuessr features?

GeoGuessr is lots of fun right from the start. As you progress it becomes more challenging, which is often where the learning of new places starts to come in.

Having that points system is a great way to keep students engaged as well as a way to make things competitive, if that's something which works for your class. There are also incentives for earning more points, such as levelling up to get new player titles and visuals around your avatar. 

Several modes of play are available, including Quick Play, Classic Maps, and Maprunner, to add different styles of gaming to keep things fresh. You can also continue games at the point you left off.

Upgrade to Pro and you get more features, including no ads, no waiting to play more, map creation, and more.

GeoGuessr Price

GeoGuessr is free to use a basic account, but there are limitations on the number of plays per day and there are ads on the website.

Go for the Pro tier, at $3.49 per month or $23.88 annually, and you get uninterrupted play as much as you like, no ads, play with friends mode, avatar items, map creation, and competition against others with leaderboard access.

GeoGuessr best tips and tricks

Play together
Start off on the big screen as a class to get the idea of how to play but also to engage the class in exploration.

Compete
Keep track of scores and reward those in the class that show good progress in the game -- not necessarily just those with the highest score.

Share experiences
Have students share a tough one where they did well, perhaps helping others in the class learn new locations at the same time.

• Best Tools for Teachers
• 5 Mindfulness Apps and Websites for K-12

To share your feedback and ideas on this article, consider joining our Tech & Learning online community. 

The 3D interactive online exploration platform Google Earth provides a pathway to endless learning adventures around the globe. For an overview of Google Earth and a breakdown of its unique features, check out How to Use Google Earth for Teaching. 

Below, is a sample Google Earth lesson plan geared toward elementary and middle school that is focused on teaching geography. It is important to note that while geography is a natural fit for leveraging Google Earth, other content areas and Google Earth tips and tricks for teaching can be used. 

Subject: Geography  

Topic: Landforms 

Grade Band: Elementary/Middle  

Learning Objectives: 

At the end of the lesson, students will be able to: 

• Locate different types of landforms across the world 
• Describe characteristics of landforms on different continents 

Starter 

To start the lesson, go to the Google Earth home page and make sure students can see your screen. For online classes, students should be within the LMS that you are using for a live virtual class, and for in-person learning, students can see your computer screen either on their individual devices or on a larger screen in the classroom. Type in the search window the type of landform you would like to show students. For elementary students, you may want to focus on a few simple landforms, such as a lake, hill, and desert. For upper elementary and middle school students, you can add to the list and also review mountains, oceans, and plains. 

Guided Exploration 

After you have shown students examples and described each landform, students will explore Google Earth by searching for landforms across the world. Have students choose any three continents to focus on, and discover one type of landform on each continent. For example, you could have elementary students start with locating a lake, hill, and desert in North America, Asia, and Africa, while you may want middle school students to also locate a lake, hill, desert, mountain, ocean, and plain in Europe, Australia, and South America in addition to North America, Asia, and Africa. 

Using a comparison note sheet, students would fill in as they locate the different landforms. The comparison note sheet could be created on a Google Doc with columns in which students can enter the landform type, the continent location, and some of the characteristics (size, shape, color, and unique features). Once the student is on the specific landform in Google Earth, facts and characteristics about it will appear in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. You may also want to have additional columns for the specific name and country within the continent (e.g. “Mount Kilimanjaro“ and “Tanzania” instead of just “mountains”). 

Extending the Learning

As students finish their landforms exploration lesson, you could have them explore the continent of Antarctica and discover additional landforms. You could also have students   continue to pursue Google Earth and engage with the Games and Quizzes feature or take Guided Tour of one of the landforms or related areas that they explored during the lesson. 

As an alternative, you may want to use the Guided Tour feature to get students acclimated and excited about Google Earth and introduce it at the beginning of the lesson.  

Technical Tips 

Google Earth has a variety of features that can assist students in navigating the virtual globe. It may be helpful to have a cheat sheet available for students that can be easily accessed during the lesson that reminds students how to zoom in, rotate, and tilt within Google Docs. It may also be helpful to create a screencast for students to view as needed that demonstrates how to use the search navigation feature. 

Google Earth creates an exciting and immersive experience for students, and with traveling across the world being a difficult feat, they can at least see amazing sites virtually. Google Earth can be used as an interdisciplinary tool as well, particularly connecting social studies, world history and environmental science with geography. 

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Stunning photos and in-depth stories of Earth's peoples and wildlife

Pros: Tapping into an expertise in photography, international coverage, and wildlife reportage, the site provides an amazing array of learning resources.

Cons: Teaching resources are limited; some of the wildlife videos and photos show predators in scenes that could scare very young kids.

Bottom Line: This large collection of multimedia resources teaches younger students about animals, habitats, countries, and cultures.

Read more 

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. 

By Common Sense Education

Google tools. Good.

Maps. Good.

Google map tools. Awesome.

The move by Google to create a web-based version of Google Earth a few years ago made sense. They needed something that would work on mobile devices and Chromebooks. But as a huge lover of the Desktop Pro version of GE, the problem for me was that the web-based version lacked so many of Pro’s bells and whistles.

I loved the ability to create tours and Google LitTrips, to use Historical Imagery, to combine different layers of data tell amazing stories. Sure. There was Tour Builder and My Maps but my heart still belonged to Google Earth.

But apparently Google listened in on enough of my conversations to do something about my need for tour creation tools in the web-based version of GE. A few weeks ago, they finally added the ability to generate tours with some pretty sweet features.

(If you’re semi-new to the Google Earth world, there are multiple versions. There’s the original Pro version that you install directly onto your laptop or desktop, there’s the more recent web-based version that runs through the Chrome browser – including on Chromebooks, and there are mobile app versions that run on tablets and phones. We’re talking about the web-based Chrome version here. While you can view tours created on the Pro and web versions on mobile versions of GE, you’re still not able to create tours on the mobile versions. Clear as mud?)

These new features help you and students replicate tours already present that you can find in the Voyager section of the Chrome version. You can combine text, photos, video clips, Street View images, and 360-degree videos to immerse your viewers wherever you want to take them around the world. You can also add place marks, lines, shapes, full screen slides and the ability to add text to create rich information boxes about each of the places on your tour.

The resulting stories can be organized into narratives that will fly viewers from place to place as they watch your presentation. Get a sense of the possibilities by taking a look at a Google made tour of US national parks. Or this tour of Henry Box Brown’s escape from slavery in 1849. Maybe this Google LitTrip on Anne Frank.

Or take a quick look at a Civil War Battlefield tour that took me about 10 minutes to throw together. Your teacher brain should be seriously jumpstarted by now. I think you can use this for a wide variety of both teacher directed and student directed projects. Geography obviously but this would also be great for integrating both fiction and non-fiction text. For connecting past events with current issues. For developing flipped classroom resources. For combining cross-disciplinary stuff like science and civic engagement projects your kids are doing in the community. For highlighting current events. Virtual field trips. Digital argumentative essays using place and movement as evidence.

One of the cool things that’s an improvement over the desktop version is the Google Drive integration. When you’re logged into GE and create a tour, your work is saved and dropped into an automatically created Drive folder titled Google Earth. The tool also works just like a collaborative Google Doc – allowing you and students to invite editors to the tour creation process. This lets you work with other teachers to build out and share tours complementing your instruction. It also means you can create and monitor work done by student groups or have students create their own tours together or individually.

This is perfect for those of you using Google Classroom. You can quickly create an assignment in Classroom and share it with students. (Though you can have kids view only or edit a tour as a class, there does seem to be the inability to create a tour and have Classroom make a separate copy for each student. Hopefully that’s on their to-do list.)

Get an easy to use five page PDF tutorial that walks you through the process step by step. Or for the YouTube lovers in the room, check out these three video walkthroughs:

So many Google Map tools. So little time.

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant for ESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

Can you ever have too many maps?

The obvious answer is no. You can never have too many maps.

So when I ran across some very cool old maps last Saturday at the Wichita Flea Market, there really wasn’t any question about whether or not I would buy them. The question was how many will I buy.

I settled on two. Which means my wife helped me decide that I should settle on two. There are quite a few maps already in my house and I was gently made aware of that fact. Which means semi-gently.

Both of the maps I walked away with are almost 100 years old. One is a 1924 map of tourist Rome published in Italian, the other a map highlighting the 1924 British Empire Exhibition with suggested mass transit options from around the London metro area. So cool.

Perfect for displaying, reading, primary source analysis, (the Empire Exhibition and its various colonial pavilions is just asking for some in-depth conversation) or just wafting in the 100 year old smell.

But while we all can agree how cool old maps are, new maps are nothing to sneeze at. I love the ability of digitized maps to allow access to all sorts of data in all sorts of very visual ways. Take a look at these two new atlases from the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond.

The first collection of digital maps, the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, is based on an atlas that was original created in 1932 by Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright. Many of those beautiful maps have been enhanced:

. . . in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data – remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century.

Like the original, there are 14 different chapters and almost 700 maps. All based on older maps but digitized and edited to make them more accessible and richer in content. And like the original, the atlas addresses a broad range of issues.

Beginning with a chapter consisting of 33 maps on the natural environment and a second containing 47 maps documenting the evolution of European and later American cartographic knowledge about North America, the atlas mapped an exhaustive number of historical topics: exploration and settlement of the continent, the location of colleges and churches, disputes over international and state boundaries, voting in presidential elections and in Congress, reforms from women’s suffrage to workmen’s compensation, transportation, industries, agriculture, commerce, the distribution of wealth, and military history.

For twenty-first-century audiences, it’s probably no surprise that it’s missing a few things as an historical atlas. Besides the fact that it’s now more than eighty years out of date, it is primarily focused on Americans of European descent – though, to be fair, it certainly contains a significant number of maps showing the geographic distribution of people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. Yet whatever the atlas’s shortcomings, browsing through its many thoughtful and often beautiful maps one can’t help but be impressed. Anyone interested in American history before 1930 is almost certain to find many maps in the atlas that are both interesting and useful.

So if you’re teaching any US history, the newly updated digital version is a no-brainer. Head to the About page to jump start your time in the Altas.

But wait. There’s more the people at Digital Scholarship Lab weren’t finished. They’ve also created American Panorama, an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. “It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps.”

So . . . I’m listening.

It’s a smaller collection of just eight maps so far but the maps move closer to the present, with one map focusing on electing the House of Representatives from 1840 – 2016 and another on America’s foreign-born population up to 2010, for example.

But all of the maps give you tools to help kids actually see history and begin to make sense of events in ways that simple text cannot. The Mapping Inequality map that highlights the redlining of home loans by the Home Owners Loan Corporation during the 1930s and 40s is a powerful way to jumpstart and deepen a conversation around civil rights and racism in the US.

Used together, these two updated versions of cool old maps like the ones I uncovered at the flea market give you powerful tools to hang on your teaching tool belt.

(And don’t forget to use the Library of Congress and National Archives map analysis worksheets to help kids unpack all the goodness.)

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant for ESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

Geoguessr

[Global Sim Lets Kids Direct Earth's Future

"Just one more turn" gameplay jazzes up geography

Pros: Clean interface, easy controls, and addictive gameplay make geography appealing.

Cons: Favors players with some travel experience or background knowledge in geography.

Bottom Line: It's not a typical educational game, but students are inspired to explore the world and encouraged to think critically about what defines culture and geography.

Read more here.

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

By Common Sense Education

Right after my two dream jobs of working at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Museum of American History, I’m planning to pop over to National Geographic for a few years. We’ve been connected at the hip since I was in 5th grade and first discovered their amazing graphics and maps.

So I’m sure they’d love to hire me to help out a bit around the office.

Until then, I’ll just be happy playing with some of their very cool toys. This includes, of course, their powerful MapMaker Interactive digital tool.

But it also includes their MapMaker Kits:

“MapMaker Kits offer K-12 students the opportunity to work with key mapping concepts at a variety of scales and to see the world in new ways. Unique large-scale maps allow students to immerse themselves in the exploration of dynamic environmental and cultural aspects of the world. Kits engage students in the manipulation and analysis of a variety of geographic information sets, helping them build skills in critical thinking, the representation of data, and mental mapping. Each kit enables the user to download, print, and assemble maps of the world, individual continents, and the United States in a variety of sizes.”

And when they say a variety of sizes, they mean anything from a single sheet, to a larger tabletop size, to mega maps that take up a whole wall. Seriously. How cool is that?

You can find state maps, maps of continents, hemispheres, geographic regions – all perfect for introducing and reinforcing geography and maps skills. The one page versions are perfect for having individual kids customize – both digitally or with colored pencils – specific regions and places. Give a group of elementary kids the tabletop version and ask them to piece it together correctly as an introductory hook activity.

The mega maps? With up to 136 printed pages, you could have different groups piece together different parts of the world and then combine their work for the full size version.

The Kits go beyond just basic maps to include activities such as Guess The Place. Using questions and maps, students work to identify the name of a city, state, country, or major physical feature in a continent of your choosing, or the United States. There are activities that ask kids to connect rivers and other bodies of water to population areas. Activities that help kids see relationships between language and place, population density, energy use, UNESCO world heritage sites, weather, and both human and animal migration.

You’re able to filter the many different Kits by keyword, type of activity, and content area.

You can go directly to the MapMaker Kits page but be sure to make a stop at the Nat Geo Mapping Resources page to find the MapMaker Interactive and other handy tools.

If you’re planning on the mega maps, and why wouldn’t you, this mega map printing tutorial will come in handy.

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant for ESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

Open Explorer

Compelling digital field journal site engages kids on multiple levels

Pros: High-quality visuals, an intuitive and functional interface, unusual expeditions, open-ended educational opportunities.

Cons: There's little help on the site, and teachers will need to decide on their own how to best fit Open Explorer into their curriculum.

Bottom Line: An eye-opening, fascinating way to explore the world from a personal perspective; students will learn about geography, culture, and science along the way.

Read more 

Site of the Week picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed byCommon Sense Education, which helps educators find the best edtech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. 

By Common Sense Education

For a while now, I’ve hung around over at RealClearPolitics. For a poly sci junkie, it’s a great place to spend a few minutes or a hundred, digging into polls, commentary, and election gossip. But it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that realized that the RealClear network of sites also has a History version.

Duh.

At RealClearHistory, you get the same sort of article aggregation from a variety of places in a variety of topics. We can all use a little more content knowledge and RealClearHistory is pretty decent place to find interesting resources and insight. And what better time than summer? To take full advantage, be sure to use the search feature in the top right to find articles, resources, and maps.

Yup. Maps. We all love a great map. Robert Louis Stevenson once observed:

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find that hard to believe.

Exactly. And if the great map comes along with a decent story and some context, even better.

Along the left hand side of RealClearHistory, you’ll find a section titled The Map Room that lists some of their most recent map related articles. For some reason, I’ve had trouble getting the Map Room link to work, so don’t be afraid to use the search feature if this is happening to you. You might try this link of map related search results to start.

I’ve been down numerous rabbit holes over the last few weeks as I’ve dug into articles highlighting all sorts of different maps. A few of my recent faves:

• Rare World War II Maps Reveal Japan’s Pearl Harbor strategyfrom National Geographic
• The Louisiana Purchase and The Fry-Jefferson Map of Virginia from Monticello
• Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakersfrom Wired Magazine

You’ve got all summer. So dig in. Do some exploring. Bookmark a few things for next fall.

(A quick heads up. The free version has ads. And the free version hates ad blockers. Even when I try to whitelist RealClearHistory via my ad blocker, I’ve still run into some annoying issues.)

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant forESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

Tour Creator

Simple Google tool puts kids at the helm of creating VR experiences

Pros: Useful features to add narration, ambient audio, and 360-degree photos.

Cons: No built-in audio recording capability or initial tutorial.

Bottom Line: Allows teachers and students to create compelling tours for viewing in VR or on a web browser.

Read more.

Site of the Week picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best edtech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. 

By Common Sense Education

Did you know that June 29th is the day the world celebrates mud? This investigation, through a series of nine steps, seeks to answer the question, When Is Mud Dangerous? The study looks at mudflows, also called debris flows or mudslides, which are mixtures of water-saturated debris flowing downhill under the force of gravity. 

Brought to you by Knovation, powered by ACT    

Need a brain break? Ready for some current event / world culture / global literacy questions to test your knowledge?

Of course, you do.

Six basic questions covering events of the day and an awareness of the world around you. (Be sure to check your work at the bottom of the post.)

1. In which of these countries is a majority of the population Muslim?
a. South Africa
b. Armenia
c. India
d. Indonesia

2. Which language is spoken by the most people in the world as their primary language?
a. Russian
b. Mandarin Chinese
c. English
d. Arabic

3. Which country is the largest trading partner of the United States, based on the total dollar value of goods and services?
a. Canada
b. China
c. Mexico
d. Saudi Arabia

4. Approximately what percentage of the United States federal budget is spent on foreign aid?
a. 1 percent
b. 5 percent
c. 12 percent
d .30 percent
e. 40 percent

5. Which countries is the United States bound by treaty to protect if they are attacked? (select all that apply)
a. Canada
b. China
c. Japan
d. Mexico
e. North Korea
f. Russia
g. South Korea
h. Turkey

6. True or False
Over the past five years, the number of Mexicans leaving the United States and returning to Mexico has been greater than the number of Mexicans entering the United States.

These six questions were part of a larger survey given to 1200 people between the ages of 18 – 26 by National Geographic and the Council for Foreign Relations. The questions ranged from geography, the environment, demographics, U.S. foreign policy, recent international events, and economics. (Get the full report here.)

And you can probably guess how well they did. Yup. Not well.

The average score was 55% correct.

And, yes, we’ve all seen similar types of doom and gloom stories. Using the results from some multiple choice history (or civics or geography or whatever) test, some conservative (or liberal or whatever) group is now claiming that the world is coming to an end because a bunch of 8th graders don’t know the capital of Delaware (or the primary export of Taiwan or whatever.)

At first glance, these questions do seem like the sort you’d find on a state level standards assessment. You know the ones I’m thinking about . . . low level, rote memory kinds of questions. But I do think that the questions – and answers – in this particular survey tell a different story than what we typically see.

A multiple choice question that asks a student to regurgitate the capital of Delaware or the date of Lincoln’s election is not always easily connected to deeper, more important topics. I can Google Dover and 1860 and I’m done. But if I’m a twenty-something (or 15 or 35 or 65 or whatever) US citizen and don’t know anything about the movement of people across borders or what we spend as a nation on foreign aid, how can I join the ongoing conversation about immigration?

Or if I incorrectly believe – as did 88% of those taking the survey – that we spend anywhere from 5% to 40% of the US budget on foreign aid instead of the actual 1%, why would I encourage federal politicians and officials that it’s a good idea to help support education for girls in Muslim countries?

The survey “revealed significant gaps between what young people understand about today’s world and what they need to know to successfully navigate and compete in it.”

Kathleen Schwille, vice president of education at the National Geographic Society is concerned:

Even people who’ve been through college are still not gaining this sort of basic level of understanding about the world and how things are connected to each other. (We) can’t ignore things that are happening on the other side of the world, because they do impact us.

Why is that a big deal?

• The American and global economies are tied together. Kansas crops, airplanes, petroleum  – all part of the world beyond the state.
• Climate change, financial markets, water rights, food security, disease, migration, terrorism are not country specific – these and other challenges don’t pay attention to international borders.
• The US population is a collection of multiple ethnicities and cultures with connections to places around the world.

The good news?

A majority of those who took the survey said that it’s important for them “to be knowledgeable about geography, world history, foreign cultures, and world events” and 72% said these topics are becoming more important to them. Kids know this is important and want to learn more.

So what to do?

Dana Mortenson of the organization World Savvy has some answers. World Savvy is a group working with thousands of teachers to integrate global competence into their lessons.

What are the values, attitudes, skills and behaviors that must be cultivated if we’re going to live in a peaceful world? It’s an openness to new opportunities and ideas. It’s a desire to engage. It’s self-awareness about culture and respect for different perspectives. It’s comfort with ambiguity. It’s the skill to investigate the world through questions. Empathy and humility are big pieces of all of it.

World Savvy offers a variety of resources and tools that you can use to build global literacy skills in your students. You’ll find dozens of downloadable documents, lessons, professional learning activities, and student strategies.

So you’ve got a few months between now and next August. Plenty of time to put together some killer lessons that’ll throw your kids into the top percentile.

So . . . how did you do on your quiz? 

Correct answers (percentage of respondents who gave the correct answer)

1. D  (29 percent)
2. B  (49 percent)
3. A  (10 percent)
4. A  (12 percent)
5. A  (47 percent), C  (28 percent), G  (34 percent), H  (14 percent)
6. True  (34 percent)

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant forESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

I spent the morning at Slate Creek Elementary in Newton, observing just a few of the cool things going on there. Lots of PBL. Lots of inquiry. Lots of great student questions.

And one of my favorite hook activities ever.

Tenae Alfaro, Slate Creek principal, is planning a summer trip and so she asked fourth grade kids to do some in-depth research and plan a trip for her. Now . . . I’m not sure she’s actually going go take the trip kids come up with. But what a cool essential and authentic question to ask nine-year-olds.:

So there’s a crowd of fourth grade kids over in Newton doing research on states and monuments and museums and all the kinds of things you might typically do on a cross-country family trip. And one of the tools that would be ideal as part of that final product is Google My Maps.

I’m still surprised by the number of teachers who aren’t aware of this piece of Google’s G Suite. If you’re still not sure what it is, think Google Docs in map form. My Maps supports collaborative editing and sharing, it’s easy to use, and it integrates with all the other G Suite apps. It’s a great tool for helping kids see connections between events, people, and place.

And for the kids over at Slate Creek (or your students,) it’s a perfect way to create rich, deep, and multi-layered visual representations of trips. So use it for planning a principal’s summer trip, as a Google Lit Trip that highlights events and travel in fictional stories, or to chronicle actual trips and events such as Lewis & Clarks Corps of Discovery.

• Cause it’s a map. Seriously . . . maps are perfect for visualizing places
  And distances. And relationships. And for highlighting the best BBQ places. But even if you’re not using it to track down Roy’s Pit BBQ and Kansas City Joe’s, it’s still useful to help kids see where places are in relation to each other as they create both authentic and fictional trips.
• It’s part of your school’s Google Drive suite of tools
  You all know how much I love all things Google. As you create your trip on My Maps, it auto-saves a copy of the map into the Google Drive account your student is using. So it’s perfect for stashing in a Google folder that is storing all of the trip planning resources, photos, and itineraries.
• You can add all sorts of extra details to your map
  Because it’s part of the Googleverse, you can use Google’s default search features, add images, or insert YouTube videos into your map with the click of a button. If a specific place, museum, battlefield, or point of interest is in the Google database, you can quickly add its website, reviews, and contact info to your map. This also allows your kids to customize their travel map by adding photos or videos as well as text. All of these extras are added and are viewed by clicking on an individual marker. (Scroll down for a handy tutorial for how-to’s.)
• Kids can plan a specific route by creating a direction layer
  Each My Map can have multiple layers of markers. One of the My Maps options is to generate directions. So  . . . students can combine those two features to create a layer of directions from one location to the next as part of their trip planning.
• My Maps is super editable
  Pretty much everything a kid could add in a My Map is customizable. So think custom icons and colors for different markers making it easy to see what things with just a quick glance. For example, we’re taking a Civil War Battlefield Extravaganza in a month. So we’ve got stars for battlefields, little museum icons, BnB icons – all color coded and numbered so that each day makes sense in the bigger picture of the trip. 

• Semi-mobile friendly
  All My Maps are accessible for viewing on mobile devices. iOS devices don’t yet allow you to edit a map but Android users can install the My Maps app for full features.
• They’re easy to share
  It’s super simple to share maps with others and allow them to edit and add to the map. Or students can lock their maps after their maps are finished by changing the privacy settings to View only. They can then be shared with you for assessment or embedded on your class website. 

Get step by step instructions to creating your first My Map at the super handy Google My Maps support page. The sweet video below is also great for a quick walkthrough. 

(For the youngsters in the group, Clark Griswold was the greatest father of all time – packing his family into a station wagon for a cross country trip to visit the amazing WallyWorld. He would have loved Google My Maps. And if you haven’t seen the movie, well . . . you haven’t lived until you’ve watched Chevy Chase shoot John Candy with a BB gun. Just saying.) 

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant forESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies

Globe Smart Education 1

Engaging stories, activities introduce kids to peers around the world 

Pros: Stellar teacher guides offer lots of classroom connections that bridge disciplines.
Cons: Some kids talk very quickly in the story sections; high price tag may be prohibitive.
Bottom Line: A smart, thoughtful way to learn about the lives of kids around the world.

Read more here.

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.  

By Common Sense Education  

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is introducing  globetrotting super-thief Carmen Sandiego to a new generation, beginning with the launch of a new animated series debuting Jan. 18 on Netflix and produced by HMH.

To celebrate Carmen's return, HMH partnered with Miami-Dade County Public Schools this week to bring nearly 2,000 students together for a live event with superstar Gina Rodriguez, the new voice of Carmen.

Carmen's return will include:

• Netflix Animated Series: On Jan. 18, the new Carmen Sandiego series, starring Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) as Carmen and Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things) as her tech-whiz sidekick, Player, will bring viewers inside Carmen's world, revealing for the first time her identity as a modern day Robin Hood traveling the globe and stealing from V.I.L.E. and giving back to its victims. 
• Book Series: HMH's Carmen Sandiego 2019 publishing program will kick off with Who in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? on Jan. 22. Available in both Spanish and English and featuring a foreword by Gina Rodriguez, this novelization based on the Netflix series uncovers the story behind the enigmatic thief. 
• Carmen in the Classroom:  This week's announcement signifies Carmen's return to schools, including resources such as lesson plans mapped to Carmen episodes, Google Earth and Google Expeditions games, original digital content and Carmen-themed instructional videos designed for classroom settings, a school-focused Carmen Sandiego webpage with free resources, downloadable activities and more. 
• Live-Action Movie: Netflix has announced a Carmen Sandiego live-action feature film starring Gina Rodriguez, written by Mark Perez (Game Night), and produced by Kevin Misher, Gina Rodriguez and Caroline Fraser of HMH. Release is slated for 2020.

 We all know that I spent a significant amount of my formative years digging through old National Geographic maps. You know the ones I’m talking about. They got slipped into the middle of the magazine and unfolded into poster size after you discovered them. I still have an old shoebox full of them. Cause they’re just so cool.

So it shouldn’t surprise any of you that an online article about maps, especially one from National Geographic, is going to catch my attention. But before we head over to take a look, a quick geography mental map quiz.

Ready?

First step, create a mental map of the world. (If you’ve got a few extra minutes and some paper and pencil, feel free to draw it out.)

Got it?

Based on your mental (or actual) map of the world, answer a few simple questions:

• How much of South America is east of Miami, Florida?
• How much of Africa is north of the equator?
• Which city is further north – Paris, France or Montreal, Canada?
• Venice, Italy is located at the same latitude of what major American city?
• Which is bigger? The lower 48 United States or Brazil?

The questions are taken from Why Your Mental Map of the World is (Probably) Wrong and they’re probably going to mess with your head. Cause most of our mental maps are wrong. And there are some pretty good reasons for that. But it’s an interesting article because it reinforces the need for the intentional integration of geography into our social studies instruction.

(Need the answers? Scroll to the bottom.)

One of the things the article talks about is the emotional connection that maps make in our brains. And that’s a good thing. The sad thing is that much of what we call geography instruction fails to make these emotional connections. The result? Our kids don’t remember basic geographic info or make the connections between place, people, and events.

So we need geography activities that engage kids at the emotional level. Explore and adapt these:

Start with maps that describe things that we usually don’t think about or in ways that catch our attention. Start with these. 36 Maps That Explain the World, 40 More Maps That Explain the World, 37 Maps That Highlight Immigration in the US, and 33 Maps That Explain the United States Better Than Any Textbook.

Introduce or review basic maps skills by asking kids to map their memories. Get an idea of what that can look like at this Tumblr. Then ask students to create a map that targets something specific to them on a map. Last week in groups, our PLC created maps of Kansas that showed favorite restaurants, towns they’ve coached in, and tourist locations that they’ve visited.

Work with your ELA teachers and have students create Lit Trip maps of fiction, non-fiction, and short stories that they’re reading. Ask kids to create maps of their favorite video games or movies. Activating prior knowledge and connecting that to a visual format such as a map is perfect for building map skills.

Try using infographics to create maps that look different than what kids expect. Ask them to create their own using tools such as Canva or Infogram. 

Use maps to make sense of political cartoons.

Explore the tools at The True Size – an online tool that can help kids visualize the actual size of countries.

Use Bouncy Maps to connect locations with data. Maps become bigger or smaller to show differences in the data. Want kids to get a visual sense of where refugees are coming from? Be sure to play with all the buttons to create a wide variety of maps. 

We need to be asking better questions and giving kids problems to solve. These tools can give you the resources to do that.

Still need the answers to our quiz? Here ya go:

• How much of South America is east of Miami, Florida?
  Pretty much all of it.
• How much of Africa is north of the equator?
  2/3
• Which city is further north – Paris, France or Montreal, Canada?
  Paris
• Venice, Italy is located at the same latitude of what major American city?
  Portland, Oregon
• Which is bigger? The lower 48 United States or Brazil?
  Brazil

cross posted at glennwiebe.org

Glenn Wiebe is an education and technology consultant with 15 years' experience teaching history and social studies. He is a curriculum consultant forESSDACK, an educational service center in Hutchinson, Kansas, blogs frequently at History Tech and maintains Social Studies Central, a repository of resources targeted at K-12 educators. Visit glennwiebe.org to learn more about his speaking and presentation on education technology, innovative instruction and social studies.

G'Day Mates! The 26th is Australia Day and it's a great time to explore the Australian culture through tourism, inspirational stories, inspirational poetry, and through amazing Australia facts.

 Courtesy of Knovation   

Atlas Obscura 

Explore forgotten spots, hidden gems with user-submitted photos, tales 

Pros: Great images and an appealing tone reveal stories that are sure to surprise and delight.

Cons: With so much user-generated content, the quality of your journey may vary, and it's hard to target learning to a particular place or theme.

Bottom Line: A fun gateway to real-world exploration through a stellar online experience. 

Read more here.

Site of the Week picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best edtech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

 By Common Sense Education 

We hope you had a good October.  We have been busy with technology, teaching, reading and learning all kinds of new things.  

Students in the Cyber Security Fundamentals and AP Computer Science Fundamentals classes and members of the Computer Science Honor Society had a great time with presenters Ms. Camara Williams, School Site Engineer and Mr. Troy Perkins, Network Engineer 3 - Security.  Both work for the Norfolk Public Schools (Norfolk, VA) Network Services Division. Participants learned how they are traced by schools and businesses. Students asked great questions and one decided that Mr. Perkins is the most important person in the school system because he can shut everything down with a flip of a switch. Members of the Technology Student Association created buttons for the event.   We hope your school had a fun time teaching and learning about Cyber Security and being a good Digital Citizen!

This month we are going to focus on Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day. November is a perfect month for celebrating GIS Day as part of Geography Awareness Week. 

Each city, county, town, etc. has a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Department.  Their web portal contains Maps, Mapper Tools and Street Index Documents. In past years, members of our city’s  GIS Department have been speakers to Social Studies (World Geography) and Career & Technical Education (Marketing and GIS) classes.  For your local department’s site, just Google your area, state and GIS. 

We have collaborated with our Geography classes on a number of activities. In a two-meeting activity , every student was assigned a country, and we had them check out a book from our list. Everyone found a book set in their country, with a main character from their country or one who had moved to their country. Students read 50 pages of the book.  They were given time in the library and some time in class to read. They did not have to finish the book, but most did. Students identified the 5 themes of geography in their book and shared this with their class. They also shared something they learned about the culture. Some students told us that even fictional locations work for this, and they were right. This works with movies too. Our Foreign Language classes have a film festival that usually takes place November. Check out the “Geography Goes to the Movies” section of the Nat. Geo. website for some suggestions and lesson plans. 

As part of the geographic celebration, we try to involve all our students in an activity which will make them interested in “finding out where that is” or learning more about “that place.”  This year we have students and teachers completing a Google form survey on our website identifying where they were born and the farthest from that place they have lived. We will post lists, put pins in our our 8 foot map and post fun facts so kids will look closely and perhaps learn about these places. We take those locations and send out quiz questions in the morning. Teachers and kids can win buttons and candy. 

As we are studying the Pilgrims, November is also a good month to become more knowledgeable about other people who have left their country to come to this country.  Our students are meeting new classmates who are from different countries, and learning about their culture and their journey can be enlightening. The immigrant experience is the topic of more and more children and young adult  books both fiction and non-fiction. You will find some links to lists in the resources section. 

November 4-10 is International Games Week Sponsored by the American Library Association, it is “an initiative run by volunteers from around the world to reconnect communities through their libraries around the educational, recreational, and social value of all types of games.”  Did you know there have been 11 Nobel Prize Winners for Game Theory? In the Computer Science & Computer Science Principles classes, students research a Game Theorist or Game Entrepreneur.  In Economics Classes, students play the board game Monopoly or online. It is a great way to teach strategy skills and teamwork! Science classes play Pandemic or an online CSI adventure and Art, art games. ESL students can play some of these games.  

Geography

http://www.studentguide.org/geography-resources-maps-facts-for-students:
Map, Facts and Geography games

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/globaltrek:
KIds pick a destination and learn about the country, a few of its important people, and keep a travel journal. There is also a kids’ Q&A.

https://kidsgeo.com:
Online textbook in which kids learn about geography and geology with cute videos and games

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com:
Great source for all things kids and geography 

https://explore.org:
Live video feeds of animals and locations. Studying the arctic? Check out the live polar bear feed or the Aurora Borealis. 

https://www.loc.gov/maps/collections:  
The Library of Congress has a collection of neat historical maps 

Immigration

Below are lists of books telling the child-young adult immigration experience

https://www.readbrightly.com/books-about-immigration-for-kids:
Penguin Random House’s Brightly with book suggestions for all ages and teacher resources

https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=top-10-teen-titles-2018:
School Library Journal’s list https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lists/teaching-content/books-about-immigration-grades-6-12: Scholastic books grades 6-12 with teaching materials.

http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2017/03/16/booklist-refugee-experience-teens:
The American Library Association’s Young Adult Services publication. Great source of all things teen reading 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/teen/5-great-immigrant-narratives-ya:
A list from the popular bookstore 

Computer Science Week : https://csedweek.org/ 

Hour of Code: https://hourofcode.com/us  

Happy Turkey Day! Deborah & Lisa 

cross posted at collaborationsdigitalandotherwise.weebly.com

Deborah Marshall is the Department Chair of Career & Technical Education and Lisa McKnight Ward is the librarian at Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia. Both are Nationally Board Certified, former Teachers of the Year, who have taught multiple subjects including AP and IB courses. They have over a decade of experience collaborating on technology-based learning. Read more at collaborationsdigitalandotherwise.weebly.com/

Discovery Tour by Assassin's Creed: Ancient Egypt

Popular game's education mode offers stunning view of ancient world

[Great Sound, Graphics Draw Kids Into Disaster Sim]

Pros: Thanks to a multimillion-dollar budget, this game is polished and detailed in a way few -- if any -- educational games are.

Cons: The censoring of nude statues is both bizarre and historically inaccurate.

Bottom Line: This game is an absorbing experience that offers students a unique, living and breathing view of ancient Egyptian art, life, and culture.

Read more here.

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

By Common Sense Education

Celebrate Leif Ericson Day on October 9th by learning about him and his father Eric the Red. These Norweigan explorers lived five hundred years before Christopher Columbus and explored Greenland and North America well before any others.

Courtesy of Knovation

[Free PBS Site Explores Nature Through Games & Real-World Activities]

Google Lit Trips

Free virtual sightseeing tours let kids explore literary settings

[10 Great Movies for the STEM Classroom]

Pros: Cool Google Earth-based tours let kids explore literature in the real world.

Cons: Using tours effectively takes some legwork and technical know-how; some of these user-generated tours are much richer than others.

Bottom Line: A good starting point for extending students' engagement with the classroom’s most-used literary texts.

Read more.

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

By Common Sense Education

National Geographic Education

Explore the fascinating, wide world with multimedia resources

Pros: Quality content, superb videos, and detailed lesson ideas for thought-provoking exploration.

Cons: It's not personalizable, and there's no way to track past visits.

Bottom Line: It's a wonderful resource for anyone looking to learn more about science, geography, ecology, current events -- basically, the world we live in.

[Teach Conservation, Natural Selection, Biodiversity and More With Free Ecology Resource]

Read more here.

Site of the Week picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best edtech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.

By Common Sense Education

FRESH FROM THE WORLD: WHERE YOUR FOOD COMES FROM

This interdisciplinary program uses animation to introduce students to the history of many of our favorite foods, as well as how and where they’re grown and processed and how they get to us.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: INTERDEPENDENCE

Help students map and explore how the simple things they use everyday (e.g., the clothes they wear) originate from many sources and affect workers and the environment in other countries.