David Warlick and ClustrMaps

Reading David Warlick's blog about Bernie Dodge's presentation in Vermont. He was talking about his formula for learning power, attention x depth x efficiency, which he also talked about last year at CUE. David Warlick's blog is interesting, but his ClustrMap is depressing. He has a million red dots all over the world, and I have about 3!

Draggable Driving Directions

Have you ever gotten driving directions on MapQuest or another mapping site, and then you didn't want to go the way it told you to go? Google Maps has added some very useful features to address just this problem. Now you can drag your route, add stops, change the order of the stops by dragging them up or down. Here's a video that shows how it works.

More on Maps

Larry Ferlazzo pointed out that there are a number of mapping sites, including Google Maps, (Click on My Maps)which has some nice examples of projects, like a historical guide to Route 66. Here is a student project by one of his ESOL high school students.

Other map sites he recommends to his students are Microsoft Virtual Earth, Continento, Wayfaring, QuickMaps, Click2Map,

UseaMap.com

I got an email from a person in Dublin who has created a mapping site, like TinyMap, where you can create your own map, save it online, link to it, and also easily embed it in your blog or anywhere else online. The site is called Useamap. I made a map of where OTAN is. Unfortunately, the satellite photo is old, so there is only a vacant lot where our offices now stand, but hopefully that won't be the case for your school or community! Our building is quite new.

This could be a nice activity for anything that involves mapping, distances, math, community information, etc. You can also add notes, directions, comments and photos (although I couldn't get the photos to work.)

TalkShoe and TinyMap

I've been having fun preparing for my Web 2.0 presentation at the adult education Technology and Distance Learning Symposium on Feb. 20-22 in Sacramento, and finding all kinds of new social networking sites. One is TalkShoe, that lets you call in and create a podcast with as many other people as you like, save the audio file and make it available as a podcast.

Another fun one was TinyMap, a site that let's you create your own map, put routes and markers on it, and save it with its own URL. For example, here is a map of my daily walk in Florida Canyon from my old house.