This week is Geography Awareness Week. On Saturday I shared a great resource for a geography lesson on interdependence. That lesson is called the Global Closet Calculator and it was developed by National Geographic. Here are seven other good resources that you can use in geography lessons this week or any week.
Stack the Countries is a fun geography app available for the iPad, the iPhone, and the iPad Touch. The game requires players to correctly answer a geography question in order to earn a game piece that they then place into a row. The object is to stack up pieces to reach a target height. When the target height is reached players move on to the next level.
Uncharted.fm offers a series of progressively more difficult geography lessons and quizzes. In the beginning you’re limited to one region and or continent at a time. As you master each region or continent you earn badges and unlock new challenges. I really like the manner in which Uncharted.fm presents the lessons. In each lesson you’re shown a country, the country’s name is read to you, then you practice identifying it in two ways. You identify countries by choosing the name of the country that is highlighted for you. You also identify countries by selecting the one of the three highlighted that match the name you’re given.
Overlap Maps is a free service that can be used to quickly compare the size of countries, states, provinces, and some bodies of water. To create a visual comparison of two countries select one country from the “overlap this” menu and select one country from the “onto this” menu. The comparisons you make are displayed on a map. You can make comparisons from different categories. For example, you can overlap Lake Erie onto New Hampshire.
To help your students prepare for next year’s National Geographic Bee, National Geographic offers the GeoBee Challenge. The GeoBee Challenge is a daily series of ten geography quiz questions. The challenges can be played in apprentice mode or in expert mode. Apprentice mode gives students two tries at every question. The expert mode gives just one shot at each question.
Harnu is an interesting whose is to enable you to discover news, videos, music and connect with people all over the world. To discover news, videos, and music sign-in to Harnu, select a media type, then select a country. Harnu will then give you a list of news stories, videos, or music from your chosen country. To connect with people all over the world sign-in to Harnu, select “send message,” select the location to which you want to send a message, then write and send your message. People from that location can see you message and reply to you. And you can use Harnu to select location, find people sending messages from those countries then reply to them.
Place Spotting is a website of geographic riddles. Place Spotting is based on the Google Earth platform. Place Spotting users can create their own geographic riddles or try to solve riddles created by others. The search feature on Place Spotting lets users search for riddles based on level of difficulty, language, region, or creation date.
Geosense is a fun way to use and improve your knowledge of world geography. Players can play against the computer or challenge another player. Geosense can be played anonymously or you can register and have your scores recorded for you. There are four Geosense maps (US, World, Europe, or advanced) that players can select from. Geosense is also available as an iOS app.
Bonus Item! 21 Map Creation Tools for Teachers and Students
