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!
