Quick & Easy Mapping Made Easy

While attending a conference recently I was in a workshop that was offering a lot of resources for Social Studies and Science and I was introduced to what I thought was a really great website.  As soon as I saw the website my ADD kicked in and I started thinking of all of the ways that it could be used for Social Studies mostly and as well for the other curriculum areas.

The site, oh yeah I have not told you yet, is Batch Geo.  This site gives you the ability to quickly create an interactive map from Spread Sheet data.  Yes you can create a map from a simple data sheet.  As long as there is an address field you will be able to create a map in three steps, yes three steps.  After you go to the Batch Geo website step one is to get your data sheet and copy and paste the information into the text box in the middle of the screen.  They even have a downloadable template which you can get so that you can just fill in the blanks with whatever information you want to map.  Step two (optional) is where you can set some parameters for the map contents.  Step three is just you pressing the Map Now button so that the website will create the map from your data.  Now depending on how much information you paste into the window will depend on how long it will take for the site to convert the data into a map.  It really does not take that long, I pasted in a five column by eighty row spreadsheet and it still took less than a minute total time to create the map.

After the Map has been created you have the option to Save & Continue which allows you to give the map a title, description, email address and to list as public or unlisted.  Once you Save the information you will be sent an email with the information about the map you have just created.  In the email that you receive is a weblink to the map, a link that will allow you to edit the map afterwards and the full embedding code so that you can place your map into a website, wiki or blog like I have done below.



View Colleges of NC in a full screen map

So now that you know how to create the map what can you do with it?
Here just a very few things that I thought about during the conference session:

• Time lines
• War Battles
• BC
• Medieval Times
• Revolutionary
• Civil War
• WWI, WWII
• Author, Scientist, Famous people time lines
• Virtual Field Trips
• Literature Trips
• College Planning for HS Seniors
• Disaster Events

Give it a try and see what you think about the website and then share some more resources on how this can be used in your classroom by commenting on this article.