10 Good Resources for Geography Awareness Week

From Richard Byrne @ Free Technology for Teachers:

Geography Awareness Week begins today. This is my favorite academically-themed week of the year because I have enjoyed learning about geography and teaching geography for as long as I can remember. If you're looking for some resources to use this week, take a look at my list below.


Geography GamesSpacehopper is a game based on Google Maps Street View imagery. Spacehopper shows you a Street View image and you have to guess where in the world the image was captured. You can click the clue button to have the country identified before making a guess. After three incorrect guesses the correct answer will be revealed to you. You can play Spacehopper on a global level or you can specify that you only want to see images from a particular continent.

Smarty Pins is a Google Maps game develop by Google. Smarty Pins presents players with a trivia question that they have to answer by placing a pin on a map. Players earn "miles" for correctly placing a pin on the map. Players can lose miles for answering incorrectly and or taking too long to answer. Games are available in five categories; arts & culture, science & geography, sports & games, entertainment, and history & current events.

Where is...? is another good game geography game. This game uses a popular format for geography games; the name of a city is presented to the players and they have to click the map to guess where the city is located. Players are given immediate feedback on their accuracy in the form of a measurement, in kilometers, of the distance between their guesses and the correct answers.

GeoGuessr shows you a Google Street View image and a clue to try to guess where in the world the imagery was captured. Playing GeoGuessr is a fun way to get students to look at all of the visual and text clues they have in order to form a good guess as to where in the world they think the imagery came from.

Capital Toss is a free geography game from ABCya. The game has a state capitals mode and a country capitals mode. In both modes of the game works the same way. The name of a state or country appears at the bottom of the screen and three rows of capital names scroll across the top. When the correct capital name appears players virtually toss a ball at it. After ten correct answers players can choose a new ball. Three consecutive incorrect answers ends the game.


Instructional ResourcesThe USGS offers free topographic maps for most of the United States. The maps can be downloaded as PDFs through the USGS store. The maps can be used in the 27 suggested topographic maps lessons found in the USGS education site. All of the lessons are rated by grade level and time required for completing the activity. In the list of lesson ideas you will find suggestions for lessons about typical geography topics like coordinates, scale, and map projections as well as lesson suggestions for less common things like analysis of stereo aerial photographs and analysis of humans and hydrography.

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.

As you would expect National Geographic has a lot of resources for teaching geography lessons. Head to National Geographic's activity catalog to search through hundreds of activities and lesson plans covering a wide range of human and physical geography topics. The catalog search can be refined by grade level, but unfortunately cannot be refined by topic so you'll have to browse to find the topic you want to cover in your classroom.


Geography VideosCGP Grey offers a handful of videos containing geography lessons. Two of my favorite are embedded below.

Polls, Surveys, Quizzes

From Kelly Fiztgerald the EdTech Nut

Suggested Tools
Google Forms - create free polls, surveys and quizzes through your Google account.

Poll Everywhere (email required for account; no login required for participants) - engage your audience in real time.

Socrative (no login required for students) - real-time questioning with instant result aggregation

Poll Daddy (email required for account) - free and paid versions - create stunning surveys and polls.

AnswerGarden - free feedback tool for real-time participation, online brainstorming, and classroom feedback.

Google Doc Answer Boxes

Based on the post prior to this I decided to see how easy it was to create a document to send to students with answer boxes that expand as needed rather than the always troublesome answer lines that move.  I followed the directions in the last post and it worked as advertised.  I have attached an example below.  If you get a chance to try it out with your classes let me know.  I would like to hear how well or how poorly it worked for you and what else you figured out in the process.

Google Doc Answer Boxes Example

Google Docs: Insert Boxes Not Lines

From Alice Keeler at Teacher Tech:

When students fill out information on a worksheet typically there is a line for the students to place their answer. When students fill out information on a digital document the line does not make as much sense. Placing the cursor in the middle of the line pushes the line and the text is not underlined.

Create a Box

Instead of a line, give students a box to fill out. In the table menu choose a 1×1 table or a 2×1 table depending on how you want it to look. If I am looking for an extended answer I will type the question, press enter and use the Table menu to choose a 1×1 table.

If I want the box to be right next to the text, I will choose a 2×1 table.

In the first cell, resize to fit the text. Hovering the cursor over the edge of the cell changes the cursor to allow for dragging the width of the cell. In the upper right hand corner is a small drop down arrow to choose the type of border for the cell. Select the outer border option.

In the toolbar choices are given for the border color and width. Choose a border width of zero.

This will eliminate the right edge of the cell which you need for your box. Move your cursor over to the other cell where the student would type their answer. Click on the drop down arrow in the upper right of the cell adn choose the outer border option. For this cell, choose a cell border width of 1.

10 Fun-Filled Formative Assessment Ideas

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Formative assessment: you've heard about it, you've read the research, and you've probably tried it out in your classroom. 

Whether you're a formative assessment newbie or a veteran, these techniques can help spice up how you check for understanding in the classroom. They range from the classics, like exit slips, to ideas you may have never thought to try.

This post was inspired by Todd Finley’s big, printable list, "53 Ways To Check For Understanding".

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Mash-Up: New Google Forms + Flubaroo = Grading Time Saver

From Kelly Fitzgerald the EdTechNut:

There are several Google Form and Flubaroo videos out there, but I couldn't find one showcasing the new Google Forms with the last updates to Flubaroo. I created a couple tutorials, one with the new forms look and one with the old forms look. Both videos highlight the grading by hand feature in Flubaroo.  

New Google Forms + Flubaroo updates video:

'Old' Google Forms = Flubaroo Updates:

If you want to use Flubaroo with multiple classes, you will need to make sure that you make a copy of the Google Forms assessment for each of your classes. This will keep the students grades on separate spreadsheets. 

If you want to learn more about the new Google Forms, check out my tutorial here. 

How to Create a B-roll Media Folder in Google Drive

From Free Technology for Teachers:

The best way to have students avoid accidentally using copyrighted images or videos in their own projects is to use media that they've created themselves. One of the strategies that I frequently recommend to teachers as a way to help students avoid any copyright issues in their work is to use media from a classroom b-roll gallery. You can build this gallery by having students contribute pictures, video clips, and sounds to a shared Google Drive folder. In the video below I demonstrate how to create a shared Google Drive folder.