Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
In response to the submission from a reader, Frank Jacobs has a wonderfully detailed post on the Southern Ocean island of Kerguelen. The island has a French scientific outpost but no permanent population.
Looking at the satellite image, with the marked contrast between the glacial snowfields and the green lowlands, the mascot fairly jumps out at you.
The New York Times has made data from the U.S. census available in an interactive map. This is an excellent tool to play with, since it has geographic information about income, race, education and more. The data is at the census tract level, so it is quite detailed.
I can see using this app being very useful for local research projects. Simply comparing the location of the different racial populations in a city like Memphis to the spatial distribution of income or education would probably tell a lot that we already intuitively know.
Another wonderful Strange Map. This one answers the question, “What if U.S. states were renamed for countries with similar sized economies?”
What if you exchanged countries based on population for land area? So China, which is the most populous country would take the place of Russia, which has the largest area. It would create the intriguing map below (from the wonderful blog, Strange Maps).
[googleMap name=”Memphis, TN” description=”35 N, 90 W” width=”480″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”1″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35, -90[/googleMap]
Google Maps are a great tool for introducing the five themes of geography because it allows you, as you zoom-in from a distance, to observe things in different ways. The different views, terrain, satellite, map, offer a nice introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) layers; GIS is one of the most powerful technological developments of the information revolution and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the next year or so as the political parties try to gerrymander congressional districts into more favorable boundaries.
If you start zoomed out all the way, like in the map above, you get to see your location from a global perspective. Note that if you sign up to the google maps site itself, instead of embedding the map like I have it here, you can select an option so that the cursor shows the latitude and longitude. The largest scale view is best for talking about hemispheres and latitude and longitude. Even better would be to use Google Earth which will show the world as a sphere.
Zooming in a couple times will begin to highlight features of topography and land surface cover, two important physical components of space. Both the terrain and satellite views show this, but sometimes one works better than another so this is a good time to switch back and forth between the two and mention that this is GIS. Looking at North America, the satellite view shows the Rocky Mountain region quite nicely, while the terrain view shows the climatic gradient from the snowy northern Canada to the green Gulf Coast.
Switching to map view and zooming in a little more, the highway network and to some degree the river networks become more apparent. Google Maps is designed for general use so there’s no easy way to emphasize the importance of the river networks and ocean ports without pointing it out yourself.
As you get down to the scale of the city itself, a little of the human geography of place becomes visible if you know what you’re looking for. In the case of Memphis, as well as a lot of other cities, the loop highways don’t just direct highway traffic around the city but separates the city itself from its suburbs. There are often significant class, racial and other demographic differences between the populations living within the loop and those outside.
At a scale that covers both the city and its surroundings, the satellite view nicely shows the effects of development on the urban, undeveloped and agricultural environments. In the Memphis region (see the image directly above), the Mississippi River separates the flat, lowland, agricultural floodplains of Arkansas in the west, from the urban and suburban development atop the river bluff to the east; the difference is strikingly obvious. You may also notice the tree lined channels of the east-west flowing tributaries to the Mississippi. They’re relatively narrow but the dark green of the trees are a striking contrast to the light colored concrete and asphalt of the rest of the city.
[googleMap name=”River port” description=”River port” width=”490″ height=”400″ mapzoom=”15″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]35.0895, -90.106[/googleMap]
You can use the closer view (especially if you switch the map above to satellite view) to point out the importance of water transportation in most cities by focusing on the port. The railyards are also good to look at because all the material they transport they tend to be hidden away despite their sheer volume.
Finally, the street view lets you take a look as some of the ways people adapt to the environment. To truly understand adaptations you really need to contrast different places, which is why the small groups are asked to do this type of analysis for different cities around the world, but if you’re giving a lesson and know what to look for the street view can be a nice introduction. In Memphis, apart from the very southern style of many buildings, we have the shotgun houses that are long and narrow, with front and back doors lined up to permit air flow in the hot humid summers.
So to sum it all up, I’ve put together this graphic organizer for the five themes of geography for Memphis. It’s not complete of course, but it should have all the examples mentioned in this post. I’ve asked all of my groups to include a similar graphic organizer in their presentation to help pull everything together. We’ll see how it goes.
WORLDMAPPER has a nice interactive map that shows you how the population is distributed within different countries. The map above, of the United States, really shows how most of the population is located in the big cities. This map is a bit abstract, so I’m curious to see my students interpret it.
The BBC has a nice article explaining these maps, which includes animations showing how the maps were deformed.
In the coming year we’ll be looking at inequalities in wealth around the world. One way of looking at this is via the two maps above from the WORLDMAPPER website. Countries are scaled by the population, in the first image, and wealth in the second.
Worldmapper also has quite the number of very interesting maps, including maps related to health, violence, pollution, food and ecology. The species at risk map ties in well with the study of the Earth’s resources.
They also distribute some animated maps as well as free software, called ScapeToad, that you can use to make your own maps. I like the fact that their maps and software are clearly licensed and allow free educational use.
When introducing the x,y coordinate system using a world map it is most effective if you use the right type of map projection. Most maps use a Mercator projection which stretches thing out as you get closer to the poles. You can see this in how the latitude lines get further apart as you get closer to higher latitudes and Antarctica and Greenland get all stretched out.
The Mercator map is great for navigation, because if you measure angles on the map (bearings) between two places, you get the right bearing to sail your ship.
The better map to use for demonstrating the coordinate system would have an equirectangular projection, where all of the lines of latitude and longitude are equally spaced. These are harder to find, so I’m posting here a background map with the latitude and longitude marked on it (in 10 degree increments).
Notice the difference in sizes between the maps and the size of Greenland.
I’m also posting here, because it might be useful, a simple linear graph in Excel (or for OpenOffice) that simply plots lines if you enter the equation in slope-intercept form. There are lots of websites that let you do some really cool things (I’ll post about them later), but sometimes the simplest is what you want.
