Map Activity

This year, I am teaching Geography, History and English; plus, some other subjects.

I was not having much difficulty creating English activities for the students that incorporate the internet; however, I was having difficulty developing online activities for my two social sciences classes.

Today in Geography, I asked the students to do an activity using internet resources, which I will describe presently.  The class was enjoyable for me, and I think the students enjoyed their one hour with me more than they would have if they had been forced to do worksheets.  As a corollary, there were no classroom management issues.  It dawned on me that I need to continue to develop online activities.  By now, I should have a sufficiently adequate pool of resources from which to choose.  What is required of me is a bit of creative thinking to imagine ways that the prescribed curriculum can be adapted to the internet.

At this point, there is no compelling reason for me to use worksheets.  It was be foolish of me to do so.

For the map activity, I had students download a blank jpeg of Montreal.  Then, using the website, Fotoflexer, the students added text to their map, labelling the rivers and major areas of the city.  Tomorrow, the students will use Wikispaces to create a webpage that describes Montreal (the population, the major developments, and so on).  They will include their map on the their webpage.

Wikispaces

I wanted to create a website. For two reasons.

For one thing, I wanted to find a good website-building site that my students could use as a portal and a portfolio for their projects. Also, I wanted to create a site to organize the lessons and activities I find online; specifically, I wanted to organize them according to the topics prescribed by the Quebec Ministry of Education new Quebec Education Plan. Diigo is great for bookmarking, but it is not good for organizing bookmarks.

At first, I contemplated utilizing a mindmapping site. Mind42 was the best one, in MHO, because of its nice layout, and because it permits hyperlinking. However, I decided I wanted something more formal and more structured: a webpage.

There are a number of website-building sites. Some of them are listed on cooltoolsforschools. I perused a few of these sites, then narrowed my selection down to two: Weebly and Webnode. They are both decent sites that make it easy to create a website. Weebly has an interesting drag-and-drop interface. However, both sites seemed slightly more complicated than I liked, with constant button-clicking, and I experienced problems with the Weebly hyperlinks.

Then, through Twitter, I came across Wikispaces. I had heard of this site before, but I was hesitant to use it because a wiki suggests to me that other people can edit your website. However, it is possible to set the permissions to prohibit edits from everyone. For now, Wikispaces has the combination of simplicity and functionality that I was looking for. My (skeletal) website is here. The only unfortunate quality of Wikispaces is that there are obligatory advertisements.