map maker Archives • TechNotes Blog

Teaching social studies subjects — history, civics, geography, and more — can be a challenge. Multiple elements of time and space are required to create a picture of human society, whether in the past, present, or future. Educators and students have to balance visual media, like maps, with written texts, recordings, statistics, and other sources.

For those struggling to put artifacts, primary sources, maps, and more into a digestible package, StoryMapJS, a multimedia tool from the Northwestern University Knight Lab, can be a major boon to your teaching and learning.

Meeting Learning Goals with Narrative Learning

StoryMapJS is a tool developed to build narrative maps and large “gigapixel” images combined with other media to tell narratives, that is, stories. These interactive maps can help meet many social studies learning goals. For example, in TCEA’s home state of Texas, high school history students are expected to:

Understand “the impact of geographic factors on major events”
“Analyze the causes and effects of changing demographic patterns resulting from migration within the United States”
“Identify the effects of population growth and distribution on the physical environment”
“Identify and analyze the global diffusion of American culture through various media”
“Analyze primary and secondary sources such as maps, graphs, speeches, political cartoons, and artifacts to acquire information to answer historical questions”
“Create a visual representation of historical information such as thematic maps, graphs, and charts; and
“Pose and answer questions about geographic distributions and patterns shown on maps, graphs, charts, and available database”

An interactive mapping and multimedia tool like StoryMapJS can help students meet these goals (and others). Essentially a buildable, interactive collage, this tool helps build narrative learning. Stories are especially useful in history education. Historical narratives can help guide students to establish a broader historical context, understand potential causes of historical events and ideas, and formulate conclusions based on primary- and secondary-source documents.

With this tool, you can include many kinds of media, not just text, to give a richer representation of the past. Beyond the traditional essay, the interactive mapping in StoryMapJS can help diverse learners construct historical narratives with images, videos, and sound.

Introducing StoryMapJS

StoryMapJS presentations can be embedded into custom websites, WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. To get started, simply log in with a Google account and begin editing. Each “stop” on your map is a presentation slide.

The interface will prompt you to name your map,. Then you can create a title slide, the custom text, images with captions, and more.
Click “Options” in the top left of the window to set your language, the type of map or image you want to use, even fonts, sizes, and sharing options.
Next, begin your presentation by adding a New Slide. In each slide, you’ll have the option to add a marker to the map by pasting a set of coordinates or simply searching for a location.
Add media to your marker. StoryMapJS includes the option to upload images, add URLs, and include credits and captions. You can even customize the look of your markers.
You can upload media, pull from Google Drive or Dropbox, add a link for YouTube, or simply upload files. StoryMapJS is a powerful tool. You can explore more options here.

StoryMapJS Examples

Developed by the journalism-focused Knight Center, StoryMapJS has been used by organizations like The Washington Post, Chicago’s Newberry library, and The Times of London. These groups experiment with the tool because it allows creators to pack lots of information from multiple formats into one presentation.

So, what does that look like? Let’s explore some examples.

Southern Literacy Trail (Georgia Humanities)

This interactive “trail” leads learners across Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi in search of Southern literary history and culture. The interactive page includes a map, complete with a marked trail, which can be followed point-by-point, with each stop exploring history with text, photos, and hyperlinks.

Midwest Time Machine (Newberry)

Drawing from the research library’s vast collections of documents, this project allows learners to take on the persona of various figures from Chicago’s history, which learners can choose for themselves, getting immersed in the words and images of many points in local history.

The Runaway Scrape

Here’s one I created in order to test out StoryMapJS. Hopefully it will give you a sense of what the site is capable of.

Beyond Maps: Timelines, Audio, and More

Looking for more (or more specialized) digital social studies tools? Check the other interactive projects from the Knight Center, like their Timeline tool, which builds interactive timelines, Soundcite, which can create in-line audio in texts, and Juxtapose, a photo-comparison tool. All of these tools, like StoryMapJS, are completely free to use.

What are your favorite ways to teach with interactive tools? Let us know in the comments!

Geography plays a crucial role in connecting the social studies disciplines, giving students a concrete understanding of how people move and interact, how the landscape can shape behavior and social structures, and more broadly, how the world we live in today came to be.

But year after year, the same headlines seem to appear:

“U.S. Students Are Really Bad at Geography”

“Most Young Americans Can’t Pass a Test on Global Affairs—Can You?”

“New Study Shows U.S. Students Miss Boat on Geography”

The good news is that ed tech can help us make geography, a foundation social studies area, more engaging for learners. Despite challenges, a student’s understanding of the intersection between physical and social worlds is vital in informing their understanding of history, civics, even life and earth sciences. All of those are brought together with interactive maps that facilitate active learning.

Setting the Standard

The importance and interdisciplinary nature of geography is made clear in the TEKS, the statewide educational standards in TCEA’s home state of Texas. An understanding of geography is included in standards from kindergarten through high school graduation.

Joseph Kerski, of the GIS firm Esri and a former president of the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), calls geography more than just “a ‘nice to have’ subject for an already-crowded educational curriculum.” Instead, he claims, it bolsters “the critical-thinking skills, technology skills, citizen skills, and life skills that underpin all other disciplines. It is essential for grappling with the essential issues of our time.”

interactive maps

A Trusted Navigator

Technology can help bring geography to life. There’s no need for maps to be static. In fact, they can be dynamic, even interactive. That’s the premise behind MapMaker Interactive, a hands-on learning site developed by National Geographic. By pairing National Geographic’s world-class maps with powerful customization tools, educators can mark, label, bookmark, and save maps that are custom-built to match lesson plans.

Students studying the Great Migration, for example, can automatically measure distances from the population centers of the Deep South to urban areas in the north and west by drawing a line between two points. Further, they can add pins, tags, and images. Even adding a population density overlay is simple and demonstrates the lasting influences of the historic movement of African Americans in the 20th century.

Just about any social studies lesson can be enhanced with custom maps. Let students create their own, or bookmark and save maps for use in future instruction.

The Cartographer’s Toolkit

With the basics out of the way, here are a few of the tools built into MapMaker Interactive:

Country Facts and Flags: This allows students to absorb basic national facts while also customizing border colors to make a unique, personal map layer.
Custom Text, Photos, Videos: Students can use a vast array of markers and shapes to tell stories or display layers of data.
Saving Custom Maps: You must provide an email address to save a map and generate a link to edit and share it.
Pins, Markers, and Custom Drawings: Maps can be edited and adjusted in a number of ways with self-made labels, markers, lines, boxes, and more.
Pre-Made Layers: Want to see the population density of Denmark? A map of big cat territory around the world? An overlay of the African American population in 1960? MapMaker comes with all that and more. You can even adjust the opacity of these layers.

Scouting the Terrain

It’s a powerful tool, to be sure, and this brief introduction couldn’t cover everything that MapMaker is capable of. Luckily, National Geographic has an entire playlist of video tutorials outlining the tool’s features, so you can learn how to best to implement it in your classroom.

What’s more, National Geographic also provides a number of written tutorials outlining everything from how to create “geotours”—a set of mapped bookmarks—to charting the biodiversity of the Amazon River basin.

Going Deeper Into Interactive Maps

For those looking for more, National Geographic Education also offers a number printable, black and white, one-page maps that emphasize a number of thematic components. You can access those here (requires Flash). In addition, educators can access large maps, printable in sections, that students can work together to compile and fill with information by drawing or coloring directly on the map, similar to the digital tools offered in MapMaker.

Looking for more geographic fun?

Check out the Country of the Week Quiz from The New York Times.
Read our post about Google’s Tour Builder technology.
Learn how to create data-driven maps with Visme.

map maker

StoryMap JS: Creating Immersive Social Studies Education