Daily Archives: 3/3/2005

Hacking Google Maps

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Saw this today on Jon Udell’s weblog. It seems that with enough knowledge of javascripting, Flash, and access to a handheld GPS unit, it’s possible to create semi-animated walking or driving tour using the new Google Maps service. Jon, inspired by Matt’s work, has created a five-minute guided tour of an area near his home complete with voiceover narration, zooming in and out of the map, still images, and short video clips. Amazing!

My first thought is that this could be a great addition to the “soundseeing tours” that have become pretty popular in the podcasting world. I haven’t investigated far enough to know how complicated it is to make one of these Google Maps animations, but wouldn’t it be a great multimedia project idea for students? The project ideas are endless:

  • Tours of the kids’ hometown with local landmarks and points of local history highlighted
  • Virtual tours of places the kids have visited or would like to visit
  • Recreations of historic trips

Jon’s blog appears to be thoroughly slashdotted at the moment. I’ll post an update as soon as I can get back to it.

Assessing wikis

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We’re starting to get some traction with wikis in our district. One of our social studies teachers is using Moodle’s wiki module in her 7th grade geography class for a unit on Asia. She created a skeleton outline in the wiki, providing a bulleted list of topics like landforms, climate, history, food, climate, etc. Then the students jumped in and started adding images, additional information, and hyperlinks.

We talked yesterday about assessing student work in the wiki. It’s possible, of course, to look at the history of each wiki page to see who contributed what content. You can also imagine how cumbersome it would be for a teacher to go back through the history of each page looking at diffs and scoring each student’s work. Self-assessment is an obvious option, but I’m wondering how others have approached this issue. How are you assessing wikis? I’m all ears.