OK, Dear Reader, I need your help once again. You haven’t let me down yet.
My wife is working on a summer program for high school ESL kids who come from all over the world. She and her colleagues are fairly non-technical. They want to create a map of the world where they can display information about all the students in the program and where they come from. Here are the features I’m looking for:
- Should be able to show an entire world map, since these kids come from all over
- Should be easy for a non-technical person to find the right place on the map (maybe by entering the name of city and country), add a pushpin there, and annotate the pushpin with text, links, and pictures
- Should be easy to embed in a web page
- Should look cool (e.g., zooming in on a locale and picture) on a touch-sensitive smart board
My guess is that these criteria should be easy to meet with multiple solutions. I looked at Google mapplets, but they don’t appear to be embeddable. I’m doing my homework, but if anybody knows can save me time by posting something, I’d be grateful. We’re on a bit of a deadline. Bonus points for any tutorials or real-world teaching examples you can point me to that also hit all of these criteria.
Thanks, folks.
Alan Levine says
Many tools are likely based on Google Maps anyhow, so that would eb the route I would go. You would create it as a MyMap, and then share it. They are certainly embeddable; we had attendees at our NMC Summer Conference geotag themselves:
http://www.nmc.org/2008-summer-conference/geotag
Only the person that creates the map needs a google account to create the map.
The embed code is accessed via the “Link” link (top right. And look! They now have RSS!
Try
http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mymaps.html
Barry Dahl says
Hi Michael,
Can’t argue with the Google suggestion, although I do have another one. Wayfaring seems to have all the features you are looking for. Here is one example using some of my relatives – http://www.wayfaring.com/maps/show/10391
Click on the “Blog” link for the embed code (iFrame). They are easy to make and easy to use.
Barry Dahl says
NOTE: Wayfaring is in fact powered by Google Maps, but maybe the wrapped-around features are beneficial – maybe not. BD
Frank Benneker says
Hi Michael,
My friends at Edia built Sakai tool based on Google maps that might to some of tricks you are looking for. We are using the tool at our Sakai implementation at the university of Amsterdam
If you go the website: http://www.conflictstudies.nl (is one of our courses on the University Sakai server) and click on conflict maps you’ll get an idea of the options of the tool. The information is stored in the Sakai Wiki as a wiki page which linked to a location on a Google map with push pins.
To play with the tool you can visit the demonstration website of Edia; http://sakaitools.edia.nl . Create an account and join the map tool site.
For more in depth info contact Jacques Koeman at Edia, their e-mail is on Edia website.
Vlad Wielbut says
Michael,
take a look at U Mapper (http://umapper.com/)
This may be exactly what you are looking for.
Cheers!
mapping software says
Hi, not entirely sure if this might help:
http://www.spilerconsulting.com/services/geographic-information-system/
its a web based mapping software I developed so I can customize from heads to toes and if the ammount of information is reasonable it can fit into a laptop, depends how big is the search index and number of levels * layers, i.e: city layer + navsat + nasa srtm + etc layers
best,
Iván.