Instructify

From its beginning, social studies has been a mashup discipline, the marriage of fuzzy social sciences with more tangible fields like physical geography, to say nothing of history and civics. At times, it can be hard for teachers to make these disparate components seem like functioning parts of the same whole, as opposed to some awkwardly cobbled-together Frankenstein of facts.

Enter Worldmapper, a site that aggregates data from just about every country in the world and displays it visually on a flattened global map. Well, not really a map. A cartogram, which “re-sizes each territory according to the variable being mapped.” For example, a cartogram of GDP wealth shows a gigantic U.S., Europe, and Japan, a sizable China and India, and a tiny just about everywhere else.

Worldmapper has 366 maps so far, with more on the way. The maps are sorted into categories (food, housing, health, death, etc.) for easy browsing and are ready to use in the classroom: Text in the sidebar of each page explains the variable being shown, giving context and sometimes clarifying why a certain country stands out or doesn’t appear at all. Some pages also include relevant quotations or interesting facts. For example, I learned from the alcohol consumption map (What? I was thirsty curious.) that when a baby girl is born in South China, “her parents will brew alcohol for her, bury it underground and keep it until she marries.” (Fascinating!)

You may want to save that one for trivia night with friends. But add this site to your bag of tricks, and watch the world of social studies open before your students’ eyes. -EMILY JACK

Worldmapper

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The world can be a dangerous place. Aside from the business in Iraq, there are problems in Darfur, Chechnya, and the Basques and Spaniards aren’t exactly friendly these days, either. If you teach history or social studies, you can show your students where the hot spots are with World Conflicts Today. Click on the site’s world map and find out the specifics on conflicts around the globe. Find out about key figures, the politics involved, and even get a quick overview with handy PowerPoint presentation.

World history is built on conflict. World Conflicts Today gives you the skinny on the big ones. Hopefully, by learning the issues behind these skirmishes, we can learn how to prevent them in the future. -BILL FERRIS

World Conflicts Today

UPDATE 8/11/08: This site apparently is subscription-only now. As if that weren’t bad enough, there’s no info on how to get a subscription. Good things don’t always last, I guess. -BF

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Have you ever needed the answer to some pressing question, but found yourself no where near a computer and yielded only a cell phone to get your answer? I know I’ve been there many times, especially when traveling, and while you can sometimes text message search engines (or call a web-savvy friend), you can’t always get the answer you need. After being in such a predicament, I’ve often resolved to finally getting a smart phone, but now I don’t have to!

ChaCha  is a service that allows anyone with a mobile phone to text 242 242 (CHACHA) or call 1-800-2CHACHA and ask any question in conversational English and receive an accurate answer as a text message within a few minutes. It basically makes any cell phone a “smart phone,” and the idea is genius really: they don’t use a search engine algorithm with automatically generated responses, but rather a network of knowledgeable human “guides.” And since ChaCha uses people to respond with answers, you can easily reply with follow-up questions as if you are exchanging messages with a friend.

So let’s say you can’t remember who Gabriel falls in love with in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (it’s Bathsheba Everdene, by the way), or you need a quick weather update, or you just need to find the closest vegetarian restaurant to your current location, you can just call or text ChaCha and get a great answer quickly.

The service is totally free, too (except for any text message or minute fees  that may apply based on your cell phone plan), so you don’t have to worry about encountering any hidden costs when you get your phone bill. So make your cell phone a bit smarter, and maybe make yourself a little smarter while you’re at it! -LAUREN FROHNE

ChaCha

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Want to take your class on a trip to the Grand Canyon to see the Colorado River? How about a trip to New York City or Paris, France? Can’t afford the gas you say? Well not to worry. With Google Earth 4.3 you can take your students to any location on the globe without leaving the comfort of your classroom, or filling up your gas tank!

If you haven’t used it before, Google Earth is a Web-based program that uses satellite imagery to show places all over the world. All you need to do is download the free program and you are ready to get started. If you have used Google Earth before, version 4.3 has some great new features to take advantage of as you travel around the world. Some of these include photo-realistic buildings, swoop navigation from space to street-level, numerous layers that can be turned on to show anything from locations of volcanoes to the weather. With Google’s new street view, you can place your students virtually on almost any main street in the country. You can show your students how day and night work on our planet by using the dawn to dusk views with the sunlight feature. Take your students to any landform and not only see the 3-D image, but also view all the sight-seeing pictures and information provided by numerous professional organizations to help make this learning experience more memorable.

The new Google Earth 4.3 is out of this world – and if that is your next destination, just click on the outer-space feature and you can explore our solar system in the same way you explored our planet. -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

Google Earth 4.3

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Today’s young people are tomorrow’s diplomats. That may be a hard concept to internalize as you watch your students duel over a bag of Hot Cheetos in the cafeteria, but it’s true. To get them off to a good start, send them to Future State, the U.S. Department of State’s website for youths.

The site introduces students to the secretary of state, shares stories from the children of diplomats living overseas, provides starting places for those interested in careers in diplomacy, and links to fact sheets about every country in the world. Games for younger students teach them about world flags and test their geographic smarts.

The most compelling part of the site may be the news and events section, which seems to be targeted toward middle and high school students. As any social studies teacher knows, it can be difficult to make distant countries seem important to a 15-year-old who’s never touched a newspaper. But posts like “An American Girl in Riyadh” can make a far-off place like Saudi Arabia seem real – and even interesting – to the most apathetic American student.

The site can go a long way toward making students feel like the federal government is accessible to them, and that the wide world is not so far away. -EMILY JACK

Future State

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Want to check out where, exactly, the eagle had landed? From the folks who brought you Google Earth (namely Google) comes Google Moon. Now your students can explore the Sea of Tranquility from their desks.

Google Moon works a lot like Google Maps and Google Earth except, you know, on the moon. In addition to satellite imagery, Google Moon has facts from all six manned missions to the moon, including samples of moon rocks, descriptions of gravity experiments, and a few words about moonquakes. Students can also get closeup views of the lunar surface, and a little background information on the brave astronauts who hurtled through the cosmos and landed on the famed green cheese orb.

Sadly, though, Google’s normally excellent driving directions don’t seem to work with Google Moon. -BILL FERRIS

Google Moon

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Odysseus may be hopelessly lost, but you and your students don’t have to be. Thanks to Google Lit Trips, you can follow the story from above with all the clarity of Zeus. With the satellite imagery and smooth-sailing style of Google Earth, these tours of the greatest road trips ever written will help your students put what they’re reading into perspective.

There are Lit Trips for all grade levels, from Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The maps are handy enough on their own, but they’re also accompanied by contextualizing photographs (a picture of a dust storm for the first chapters of The Grapes of Wrath for instance) and often discussion questions as well.

There are plenty of epic journeys not up on Lit Trips yet, so if you’re excited about the tool and feeling ambitious, make it a class project to develop one. There has already been a trip developed by a first grade class, so how hard can it be?

A word of caution: beware the allure of detours! I started off following Steinbeck’s Joads to California and ended up on the opposite coast hovering over my parents’ house. -MARIELLE PRINCE

Google Lit Trips

Think you are better than me at Tetris? Chances are likely that you are NOT, but you might fare better with MapMSG.com‘s Stateris. It’s exactly what it sounds like it should be – you use states and countries instead of ‘L’ pieces and little ‘t’s. Start off with the U.S.A. and try all three skill levels – hard being, well, pretty hard. Once you think you have it all figured out, give Japan or Africa a run for their money. Heck, you can even give the counties in South Carolina a whirl.

As a nice addition to the site and for more fun with maps, you can also personalize real satellite maps and get a chance to play God with your own text and images in various places in the world. Try out writing your own smoke signals, crop circles, or Hollywood sign. These games and activities are useful for students of all age groups, and Stateris puts an added challenge on a classic favorite game. – JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Stateris
MapMSG

Given the volatile world climate, it is difficult to explain to kids why the United States is in such a precarious position on the world stage. Maps of War is a site that features short Flash animations detailing military history that could shed some light on the subject.

Take a look at the Imperial History of the Middle East map and prepare to be shocked at the sheer number of empires that have ruled the Middle East and its people. Then take a look at the map detailing the spread of major religions over time, and you’ll see a strong indication of cultures that have changed dramatically, sometimes over a period of just a hundred years or so. You’ll need to provide a lot more context than Maps of War gives, but if you need easy visuals to help students make some sense of history and its relation to the present, Maps of War should get you started.

Now, all we need are a decent impetus and some stunning visuals for a “Maps of Peace” site. –ROSS WHITE

Maps of War