Policy Map from TRF (the Reinvestment Fund) provides an easy to use tool for building maps to illustrate demographic, economic, education, crime, and energy data. Policy Map also furnishes hundreds of datasets that are graphically illustrated on a series of maps.

The free map building portion of Policy Map allows users to customize a map based on existing datasets. The maps are based on the Pushpin mapping program which is quite similar to adding placemarks on Google Maps. In fact, I can’t see any reason why the data on Policy Map couldn’t be used on Google Maps.

The real utility of Policy Map lies in the data sets and preexisting maps. The maps and datasets provided by Policy Map cover almost every possible demographic statistic a student could need. Policy Map even has a series of maps generated around school related statistics.

Applications for Education
Policy Map has over 4,000 datasets related to demographic, economic, education, crime, and energy. This collection of data and the corresponding maps are great resources for teachers and students to develop data analysis and inference skills. Students can use the data available from Policy Map build their own maps specifically related to their locality.

Below is an example of map built on Policy Map.