Tag: Mapping

Addition in Adelaide – A New Maths Map

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I have begun a new Maths Map in Adelaide focusing on addition ideas that can be seen or referred to on the map. It would be great to have your contributions it is very easy to do:

4060655295 354f50aa07 oHow can you contribute?

  1. Explore the maps below for the ideas already added, follow the links to open them in a new window.
  2. Click on EDIT in the left panel.
  3. Zoom close to the city and it’s surroundings. (Don’t forget Streetview)
  4. Find some TOPIC ideas you can see.
  5. Add a placemark (use the right colour for the age group it is best for – see purple pin)
  6. Explain the activity in the description.
  7. Change the title to show how many ideas there are.
  8. Send out a Tweet or write a blog post to highlight this resource and encourage others to contribute.


View 6 Addition Activities in Adelaide in a larger map
Make sure you explore the other maps in Nottingham, Madrid and Paris that are currently running, you can see all 4 on the Maths Maps page.

SABOTAGE! A Lesson in Open Crowd-Sourcing

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UPDATE: I have had an email from a teacher in Melbourne, Australia who has explained that it was her students who messed up the Paris map. It was by accident and not at all malicious, they were trying to create a Maths Map of their own for Melbourne. I am relieved to hear that it was non-malicious, but it has highlighted some important issues for me.

Last night I checked in with the Shapes in Paris Maths Map to check to see if others had added any other placemarks or activities. Initially I couldn’t find the map – only “Maths in Melbourne” which I hadn’t created. This is when I uncovered the sabotage.

Unfortunately “medg” (from their Google profile – last edited by…) had moved all of the Paris placemarks to Melbourne in Australia. They were able to do this because I set the maps to be (a) Public and (b) Open to editing. As the placemarks are location specific it was a long process to find the exact points the activities referred to.

I have managed to recover the map and even add some new placemark activities about Shape and Space to extend the ideas to “51 Shape Activities”. I suppose I should have seen something like this coming, but never expected someone to go to so much trouble to disrupt the resource. As John Johnston remarked maybe not naive of me just “uncynical“.


View 51 Shape Activities in Paris in a larger map

The Maths Maps have been getting a huge amount of traffic. They are in the public domain and I presume that they can be found in searches of user generated Google maps. The three maps have had over 60,000 hits combined and the Paris map over 25,000. Unlike the “Interesting Ways” series the maps are discoverable and openly public. I think that explains the traffic (which I know is not teachers) and also the higher risk of someone messing them up for a laugh.

I still subscribe to the powerful process of crowd-sourcing to generate resources but will be closing the maps to open collaboration because of the higher traffic and higher risk. If anyone wants to contribute some ideas, and I really encourage you to help, then please just send me your GMail and I will add you as an editor. I think this is the right thing to do rather than always backing up and leaving it open to anyone to mess around with – after all I think that the bulk of the traffic is the public, and not educators.

Make a Coordinates Activity in Google Earth

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I have been really excited to see the interest in my idea for Maths Maps. On Sunday afternoon I had the idea to overlay a simple coordinates grid on the satellite imagery in Google Maps or Google Earth, so children could answer position and direction based questions.

As in so many other cases those who follow me on Twitter helped me out when I was looking for an image to use for the grid. Admittedly I need to brush up on my image creation/editing skills but I was so grateful to get so many people offering help and ideas. Matt Lovegrove a Year 2 teacher in Berkshire, kindly made me some 10×10 grids which were perfect.

After much exploring I discovered that adding an overlay onto Google Maps is not so easy as it is in Google Earth. Here is a how to create your own Google Earth coordinates overlay (and in fact any image overlay!)

Firstly use Google Earth to find a place that is relatively interesting (there is quite a lot of choice you’ll agree!), you will be asking things like, ” What is the position of…?” etc so there needs to be enough in view. You might like to look around the Shapes in Paris Maths Map as it would fit well with this topic, or perhaps the location of your school might be a good starting point. Then follow these screenshots.

You can see an example of the linked coordinates task in the Shapes in Paris map, the placemark is titled “12 Coordinates Questions”.

I also created an example using the school’s location as a starting point in our lesson today. I was able to ask them about the coordinates of our school and even our classroom. I picked up on buildings and shops in the locality and kicked off the lesson using this resource. We zoomed in from space by the way (always exciting) and I told them I had spent all weekend painting the lines and had cleared out the local hardware store of red paint.

Some of the children worked independently today on the Google Earth task and they were really engaged and enjoying the task, we recorded in our maths books, as this was simple and best for us. I hope you are able to follow the idea through for your own group of students and using the screenshots create your own Google Earth coordinates activity.

Shapes in Paris – NEW Maths Map

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Hot on the heals of Measures in Madrid here is the next addition to the Maths Maps series. Shapes in Paris makes the most of this beautiful city and the maths that is visible in Google Maps.

SHAPE IN PARIS

View 24 Shape Activities in Paris in a larger map

I have had a lot of fun exploring the city from above! One facet of Google Maps is Streetview which gives us a wonderful 1st person view of the city streets. I used this same view to set some questions about what could be seen.

For example, here is a Police car and on the bonnet is the mirrored word Police written in block letters. Some of the letters are great examples of regular and irregular shapes.

Streetview Shape Questions

From space we have zoomed right down into some lettering which can only be about a metre across! This is the sort of detail that Streetview offers us and our students and I would love to see more Maths Maps questions using Streetview.

In the last few days I have heard from a few teachers in my Twitter network who have used the Maths Maps idea already with their classes and it is thrilling to here it making a difference in other classrooms.

That is the very reason why I share my ideas here.