Ahh! How cool is Batchgeo! This website takes your excel spread sheet and turns it into a map that can give you so many clues about the data you have! Just looking at all the data cant show you what this map does! Here is the map:
View Where We Live in EDU 585 in a full screen map
As you can see the Map shows you much better visual presentation of the data that we collected! This program would be an awesome tool in the classroom! For example I could use this by having groups of students collect data on where famous historical figures lived! Putting all these points on a map would show them where the people of the past (say Thomas Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln etc etc) were concentrated and why they lived in the places they did. Was it because water was close by? What did the geography look like around there? They could also use it to pinpoint Civil War battles...the list could go on and on. I think what is important to note is that actually having the visual representation of where places are on the map will give students a better opportunity to learn. They are understanding how far apart things are, where certain states are in compared to other states, how far things are a part from each other etc. These are all things you and I do not really think about but to an elementary school student seeing how far some of the Civil War guys actually marched would be amazing to them.
Tools like this will change education (for the better I think). You are still learning about the important people or events in the past you just get to supplement it with awesome visual tools. So many students are visual learners and all students can benefit from actually seeing something on a map or in a presentation. This truly will make the classroom more interesting and fun for students because they will get to help in the process of making the map!
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