history map assignment

US History Classroom Map Set

Appropriate for elementary through senior high.

Each of the maps includes:        a. 10-15 questions tied to the map        b. answer key

The questions are designed to increase in difficulty. Typically, the last 1-2 questions are critical thinking questions requiring the student to make speculations or judgments based on the information presented by the map. The initial questions enable students to build confidence in their ability, while allowing the teacher to more accurately judge the student's map reading skills. This format also enables the teacher the option to remove the later questions to better suit the needs of a particular classroom setting, with little difficulty.

The teacher can choose to assign the maps as either an individual or as a group assignment.

As a follow up, go over the answers together as a class to further enhance their map reading skills.

Unit 1--Geography and Map Skills

Day 1--Introduction of Course, Go over take home assignment

Vocabulary under Attachments.

Introduction to Data Visualization:

Assignments: Due Monday. Choose 1.

1. Find a map in a newspaper, magazine, website, etc. Make a copy of the map. Examine the map carefully and think about the choices the cartographer made. Consider the map's projection, colors, symbols, data classification, scale, and overall design. In a five paragraph essay, evaluate the map's usefulness (stressing both advantages and limitations.)

2. Using the chart below and a blank political map of the United States, design a map using the proper techniques discussed in class.

Latitude/Longitude Practice Handout

Five themes of Geography assignment under attachments.

Case Study on Population Density-- China

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Lesson Plan Local History: Mapping My Spot

Students often think of history as tattered documents, worn photographs, and musty books, all of which have little or no relevance to their lives. Maps provide an often-overlooked source of information and a new and compelling perspective on the past. By revising the work of early twentieth century cartographers, and understanding the underlying motivation for their work, students can claim a historical spot of their own.

In an era of great mobility and immigration of families from other countries, students' homes are a haven and an anchor in a neighborhood. By learning about architectural styles and periods and identifying the best features of their homes, students begin to see their homes as places of value in relation to the broader community portrayed on the panoramic map of their town.

Students create their town’s history for coming generations and place themselves on the map in a literal as well as figurative sense, by producing portions of an updated version of an early twentieth century panoramic map from the collections of the Library of Congress. To complete this project, they gather information from a variety of primary sources, including the early twentieth century map, photographs, drawings, and site visits. Each student contributes to the revised map by creating a contemporary map of her or his block.

Students will be able to:

• become familiar with panoramic and other kinds of maps as primary sources of historical information and become proficient at observing and interpreting maps;
• appreciate their own role in affecting and making history; and
• contribute to a revised panoramic map of their town.

Time Required

Three to four weeks

Lesson Preparation

• Dover, New Jersey 1903 panoramic map
• Teacher's guide to Analyzing Maps

Lesson Procedure

Activity one - investigating maps.

Students analyze several different types of maps.

Prior to the lesson:

Search the  map collections  for examples and information that will be useful in helping students to interpret what they see. Assemble a variety of maps (contour, birds eye, panoramic) from various historical periods.

• Students identify and examine the different kinds of maps. Invite them to consider and discuss what kinds of maps they're familiar with, and to compare the familiar maps to the historical maps. Lead students in an in-depth discussion of panoramic maps--their history, vocabulary, and purpose--as a form of persuasive medium designed to "sell" a city or town. Visit the  Panoramic Maps  collection and read about the maps and their creators.
• Students compare and contrast the various maps in terms of scale, point of view, detail, date, purpose, and uses. Students record their thoughts on the  Primary Source Analysis Tool . Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher's guide  Analyzing Maps  to focus the group work, and select additional questions to focus and prompt a whole class discussion of their analysis.

Activity Two - Investigating Community

Students analyze a historical map of their community and identify recognizable sites. They date the homes on their block and place their own homes in an historical context.

• Arrange for time in the computer lab.
• Students investigate a historical map of their community, such as the  Dover, New Jersey 1903 panoramic map  and locate sites that have personal meaning for them (the streets on which they live, schools, parks, and other places they frequent).
• Check one: I live in a house I live in an apartment
• The best features of my home are: (check one or more) It's close to transportation It's close to schools It's close to recreational facilities It's been remodeled recently It's on a quiet street It has a large yard It is very old (historic building) (Write in another feature)
• Check one and fill in the blank I know my home was built in the year______ I think my home is about______years old
• My home has the following spaces Bedrooms Dining room Family room Garage (for______cars) Porch Bathrooms Eat-in-kitchen Finished basement Deck Other room(s)?
• Students take photographs of their homes.
• Students should look at the block on which they live. Students should be able to report on the number of houses on the block. Request other information, such as the number of stories each house has, as it meets your requirements for the project.
• For record-keeping purposes, keep a master file with the following information:
• First and last name of student
• City or town
• Nearest important building or landmark
• Digital picture number or filename
• Year in which house was built or approximate age if year cannot be determined

Activity Three - Real Estate Advertising

Students connect with the original purpose of panoramic maps-attracting prospective residents, businesses, and investors to the town-as they look at their own homes through the eyes of potential buyers or renters. They examine real estate advertisements and create advertisements for their own homes.

• note the kind of information given in each ad;
• observe the layout of the ad and print size for each type of information;
• interpret abbreviations;
• determine what kind of person might be a potential buyer for each home; and
• look at the asking price.
• Students apply what they have learned about their homes advertising to create real estate ads for their own homes. Ads should include photos and descriptive text highlighting the positive characteristics of their homes.

Step Four - Creating Personal Maps

Students create a collage by drawing or photographing the homes and other structures on their blocks. After the blocks are completed and joined, students write letters to future children in their community explaining the mapping project.

• Students create a collage that represents their blocks. Students paste the buildings to a paper backing in the correct position and add trees, streets, and other features, as needed (At this point, the drawings are not yet joined with other blocks and may be larger than they will appear in the final product).
• Photocopy the collages, adjusting the size as necessary, to fit the size of the finished map.
• explain the project;
• explain how working on the map has made them a part of history;
• explain how they have made history by working on the map; and
• invite the recipient to make a 2103 edition of the map.

Students continue to draw grid sections of the contemporary map. Section by section, they gather data about structures erected since 1903. Students create drawings of those structures and affix them to the new map.

Further extension activities:

• Students examine the panoramic photo of their town's main street from the American Memory collection  Panoramic Photographs . They identify buildings that are still standing and those that are not. In journals, they speculate on the activities of the people in the photo. They create their own contemporary panoramic photo of the same vista. Finally, they make a videotape of a student walking down the main street narrating what she or he sees compared with that in the turn of the century photo.
• Students examine antique local postcards from the collection of a community member. They match the postcard images to buildings on the map. In their journals, they respond to the messages written by the senders of the postcards.
• Students observe and respond in journals to photos of children from the American Memory collection,  Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 . Students compare and contrast photos of children from 1900-10 to those of today.
• Students make presentations to a variety of audiences, explaining their work as cartographers.

Lesson Evaluation

Students will be assessed based on the contents of portfolios that include the following:

• Real estate ads
• Copies of collages representing the blocks where they live
• Letters to students in the year 2103

Judy Klement and Elizabeth Park

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Across the globe with World History Project Maptivities

By the OER Project Team

We know that understanding geography and maps is something students often struggle with (let’s face it: many adults do too!). That’s why each flavor of the World History Project (WHP) course, a standards-aligned world history curriculum designed for high-school students, includes a series of maps to help students orient themselves in time and space. These highly detailed world maps cover periods from 300 BCE to the Cold War.

Each map includes three layers. First, a political map identifies the many communities that students will encounter in each unit. These communities include the usual suspects, such as large empires and nation-states. But we’ve also made a concerted effort to represent the variety of non-state communities that exerted sovereignty and influence alongside states, particularly in Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas. These political maps will make it easy for students to quickly identify changes and continuities over time (CCOTs). 

Each map also includes a thematic layer that provides students with evidence to support, extend, and challenge the frame narratives and respond to the big questions we ask in each unit. These detailed thematic maps dig into topics such as the transatlantic slave trade, the spread of religions, trade routes, and the world wars. Finally, each map includes a blank black-and-white version of the political map, which teachers can zoom in on and crop to their needs for use in quizzes and activities.

These maps are fully integrated into all three WHP courses, as are accompanying mapping activities, which we like to call “maptivities.” 

Maptivities

Each WHP era or unit includes two activities related to maps. An opening geography activity orients students in time and space, providing some geographic context for what the world looked like in that time period. In these opening activities, students are asked to examine a set of maps and brainstorm some predictions about major changes in the coming era/unit.

Toward the end of each unit, the more detailed closing map activities have students applying their CCOT and causation skills to analyze themes such as long-distance trade, the spread of religion, the transatlantic slave trade, and imperialism. In these closing activities, students use geographic evidence to respond to writing prompts based on the unit/era problems and frame narratives.

Using the maps

Maps can be used online or downloaded as image files for use offline. When used online, WHP’s maps make use of the deep zoom tool so teachers and students can zoom in to different scales and see a high level of detail across different sections of the map.

Like most OER Project materials, these maps can be downloaded or printed for offline use. Teachers can also easily export these maps to their Google Classrooms.

Finding the maps

There are a few different ways to find these maps on the OER Project website. First, the chart below details the periodization of the world maps and each one’s thematic focus, along with where they fall in each flavor of WHP.  

The WHP Maps Index is a downloadable document that has each map linked to make finding these resources as easy as possible.

Finally, the teacher resources page also has every map in each flavor of WHP. Using the lefthand navigation menu, teachers can select World Maps to see each collection of maps available and download .zip files of the collections directly to their computers.

As you might be aware, we regularly update content and add new content to all our courses each year (one of the benefits of being an open and online resource!), and this holds true for WHP’s maps too. Make sure to keep an eye on our website for new maps you can use with your students in the future. Happy mapping!

New to OER Project? Explore these maps by registering for a free account today!

Course Resources

Discussions and assignments.

The assignments in this course are openly licensed, and are available as-is, or can be modified to suit your students’ needs.

If you import this course into your learning management system (Blackboard, Canvas, etc.), the assignments will automatically be loaded into the assignment tool. The assignment pages within each module link to the live assignment page. You can view them below or throughout the course. There is at least one discussion and one assignment ready to be used in every module of the course. We do not recommend assigning them all, however, and recommend selecting those that work best for you . If you choose to assign the capstone project (explained below), we suggest excluding some of the other assignments so that students have sufficient time to prepare for their capstone work.

To make edits or customized versions of the assignments, we recommend copying and pasting the discussion or assignment text directly into your LMS discussion or assignment page in order to make changes.

Capstone Project

The capstone project is an optional comprehensive assignment that could be assigned to students to complete progressively through the course. The assignment is divided into 3 to 4 pieces and culminates in students creating a PechaKucha presentation.

For this capstone project, students will pick a reformer or activist involved with a progressive or social movement between 1877 and 2000. They will evaluate and analyze the ideas, agenda, strategies, and effectiveness of the work done by their chosen reformer or activist in order to make a claim and present on their findings in the form of a PechaKucha presentation (or another pre-approved format). PechaKucha presentations follow a 20×20 presentation format, meaning that a presenter chooses 20 images and speaks about each image for 20 seconds (totaling 6 minutes at 40 seconds).

The capstone project components are shared as assignments that link to Google Documents. You can make a copy of those documents to customize them. To do so, open the Google Doc and choose “File -> Make a copy” to create your own version.

• Part 0: Social Media Activism  (also found as an assignment in Module 5)
• Part 1: Research and Annotated Bibliography
• Part 2: Draft PechaKucha Outline
• Part 3: Submit Final PechaKucha Presentation
• Assignments. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Pencil Cup. Authored by : IconfactoryTeam. Provided by : Noun Project. Located at : https://thenounproject.com/term/pencil-cup/628840/ . License : CC BY: Attribution

5th Grade Social Studies and History Maps

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Creative Assignments: Map and Timeline Exercises

by Thomas Keith | May 7, 2019 | Instructional design , Services

This post is an installment in an ongoing series that explores possibilities for creative classroom assignments.  We will showcase courses that have successfully employed creative assignments, and introduce tools and strategies that can help your students master material more fully and deeply, along with helping you to assess their knowledge and skills.

Previous installment: Podcasting

Why use creative assignments in the classroom?

Creative assignments fall into two broad categories: formative and summative.  Formative tools, such as collaborative mind mapping, allow students to explore ideas and concepts, systematize their thinking, and make progress toward mastery of new concepts.  Meanwhile, summative assignments can offer students the chance to create a lasting artifact that they can share with others, giving them a sense of meaningful accomplishment.  Such assignments are often both high- and low-stakes; they make it easy to hold students accountable for content mastery without adding large amounts of extra work.  Whether plotting a map, constructing a timeline, recording a podcast, or making a video, your students will be able to combine traditional academic research with practice in flexible, innovative thinking.

Those students who are less comfortable with the constraints of academic writing may find the challenge of creative assignments to be uniquely stimulating.   In addition, thanks to the many software tools now available for pedagogical use, your students can collaborate to create attractive, compelling projects, even when they are not in the same physical space.  In the process, they will acquire technological skills and competencies that are of great value in today’s wired world.

Map Exercises

Maps reach far beyond geography.  The movement of people, things, and ideas plays a role in countless intellectual disciplines.  As an easily understandable visual representation of such movement, maps can allow you to detect relationships and trends that purely abstract data might conceal.

In the past, the use of maps in the classroom has largely been limited to show-and-tell, but digital mapping tools have brought about a pedagogical revolution.  Students can make their own maps, “pin” information such as text captions or audio clips to locations on their maps, and, with certain tools, even track movement through space.

A number of easy-to-use tools for digital map-making are readily available.  Google’s GSuite includes My Maps, a powerful, intuitive app that allows you to select from multiple types of underlying map (political, satellite, terrain, etc.) and plot points or lines/routes.  You can make your map interactive by adding notes with text, images, video, or external links.  You can also create a Geo chart within Google Spreadsheets; simply open your spreadsheet and choose Insert -> Chart, then choose “Geo chart” or “Geo chart with markers” under Chart Type.  Geo charts are valuable for converting numerical data into an easily comprehensible geographical picture.  You can also create three-dimensional, immersive tours using Google’s Tour Creator .

A map of notable Civil War battles, created with Google Maps

Faculty and instructors at many major universities have had success with map assignments in the classroom.  Prof. Julia Gossard, now at Utah State University, introduced a map exercise into her course “Global Early Modern Europe” at the University of Texas at Austin to help her students see how early modern Europe interacted with the peoples and nations beyond the borders of the continent.  Not only did her students learn, through the process of mapping, some of the basic truths of early modern life – e.g. the great distances and lengthy times involved in voyages by sea – but the collaborative process of building a map and tracing connections brought the subject to life in a way that her students found enjoyable and fascinating.

Here at the University of Chicago, faculty members Niall Atkinson and Patch Crowley, both in the Department of Art History, have used digital maps in their courses to help their students contextualize art and architecture within their physical/spatial environment.  Prof. Atkinson was able to show his students the path that the marble used in Michelangelo’s sculptures took from the quarry to the sculptor’s studio, emphasizing the physical process of sculptural production and the costs and labor involved. His students also built a collaborative map of Renaissance architecture.  Prof. Crowley used images from Google Earth to introduce classroom discussion on how we use and interpret images, paying particular attention to the ways in which electronic media filter our perceptions and affect our viewing process.

Prof. Niall Atkinson discusses his use of mapping and graphical visualization tools in art history courses.

Further Resources: Maps

• Ditch That Textbook offers creative ideas for exercises with Google’s My Maps app.
• See also Richard Byrne’s “How to Use Google’s My Maps in Your Classroom” .

Timeline Exercises

Just as map exercises allow students to contextualize how people and goods move within space, so timeline exercises allow them to contextualize movement and change over time.  Unlike a paper timeline with its static string of dates, a digital timeline allows for interactivity: students can “walk” through a timeline and see how events in different parts of the world or different arenas of thought overlapped, or view media attached to dates (still images, audio, video) to engage with history in a rich way and learn content through multiple modes.

Many tools for digital timeline creation are available.  TimelineJS , from Northwestern University’s KnightLab, allows you to set up a basic timeline with nothing more than a Google Spreadsheet, add media from popular sites (e.g. Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or Vimeo), and embed the code for your timeline in a webpage or blog to display it to the world.  TikiToki , another Web-based software platform, offers options such as banded timelines (multiple timelines displayed in parallel, making comparison easy) and 3D timelines.   As a simpler, quicker option, you can also create an annotated timeline as a chart type using LucidChart’s timeline template.  Because Google Suite is engineered to make collaboration easy, this option works well for group assignments.

Timeline exercises are increasingly being used in higher education in creative and stimulating ways.  In her “Foundations of Western Civilization” course at Utah State University, Prof. Julia Gossard has her students create a timeline of the history of food , using TimelineJS, so they can understand the vital role that agriculture and fluctuating food supplies have played in the course of human history.  Here at the University of Chicago, the students in Christopher Dunlap’s Spring 2016 LACS course “Sciences as Solutions to Latin American Challenges, 1500-2000” used TimelineJS in conjunction with the University’s blogging platform, Voices, to build an interactive, multimedia timeline of the history of science and technology in Latin America (site requires CNetID and password to view).

Further Resources: Timelines

• Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching offers valuable advice on how to craft effective timeline assignments.
• For practical insights into what makes timeline assignments successful, see also  Derek Bruff’s “Timelines, Ed Tech, and Thin Slices of Student Learning”.

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HIST 820 Teaching History

• Course Description

Doctoral analysis and pedagogy of using primary sources, historical scholarship, and digital resources in classroom and other educational settings. Emphasis is placed on online teaching.

For information regarding prerequisites for this course, please refer to the  Academic Course Catalog .

Course Guide

View this course’s outcomes, policies, schedule, and more.*

Requires a student login to access.

*The information contained in our Course Guides is provided as a sample. Specific course curriculum and requirements for each course are provided by individual instructors each semester. Students should not use Course Guides to find and complete assignments, class prerequisites, or order books.

Sound pedagogical methodology and an understanding of the worldview foundations and presuppositions of pedagogy and educational material are essential for a collegiate educator. However, the skills and practical realities of teaching at the college level are not always emphasized in doctoral courses or programs in history or throughout the humanities. This course addresses those deficiencies. It provides an opportunity for students to draw upon their own content areas of study and expertise as they hone their teaching skills and apply pedagogical methods and the Christian worldview to course design and development. 

Course Assignment

Textbook readings and lecture presentations.

No details available.

Course Requirements Checklist

After reading the Course Syllabus and Student Expectations , the student will complete the related checklist found in the Course Overview.

Discussions (3)

Discussions are collaborative learning experiences. Therefore, the student is required to create a thread in response to the provided prompt for each discussion. Original threads should be at least 750 words and each of the 2 replies should be at least 300 words. Please see the instructions for more detail.

Discussion: Online History Lecture

For this discussion, the student will post a sample lecture that might be used for the online history class. Since this is for a hypothetical online history course, the student should consider the topic choice carefully. The topic should not be so broad as to not allow for much detail, but not so specific as to prevent connections from being made with material in preceding and succeeding modules. The lecture should be 10-15 minutes in length . The student must upload a video link of himself or herself to the  Discussion: Online History Lecture . This could utilize a YouTube link or a  K altura video. At least 2 written replies are required and must be 300 words each. In the two replies, the student must focus on technical aspects such as delivery, vocal clarity, etc., but should also respectfully interact with the material his or her classmate decided to include and provide informed alternative pieces of information.

Worldview Analysis Assignment

Using 2 chapters from History and the Christian Historian , edited by Ronald Wells, the student will write a 3-5-page critical analysis of how the authors of these two chapters articulate and apply the Christian worldview. This will be a comparative paper in which the student contrasts the approaches to the Christian worldview presented by the chosen authors. 

Book Review Assignment

The student will write a 700-800 word book review on Patterns in History: A Christian Perspective on Historical Thought by David W. Bebbington in current Turabian format. 

Course Map Assignment

This assignment is designed to help the student plan and organize for the Final Course Project. Using the template provided, the student will provide preliminary information for the final course to be designed by the end of the term. These materials will include a course title, learning outcomes for the entire course, a basic module outline of the course, and preliminary textbooks/course material. The student will be allowed to modify these later.

Lecture Critique Response Assignment

Using student and instructor responses in Discussion: Online History Lecture, the student will write a 1-2 page paper in which he or she will reflect upon these comments, considering the pros and cons of suggestions, the intricacies of lecture design, and how controversial topics/issues were handled within the lecture. 

Transcript Assessment Assignment

Using the template provided, LU’s course catalog, and the student’s own previous graduate transcript, each student will complete his or her own transcript assessment and determine which courses they are qualified to teach.

Syllabus Assignments (2)

The student will complete 2 syllabi for the same sample course for these assignments: Syllabus: Online Course Assignment and Syllabus: Residential Course Assignment. The online syllabus should relate to the Course Map Assignment.

Final Project Assignment

Using the template provided, the student will create a full sample 8 week online course. The student should utilize the material from the Course Map Assignment and the Syllabus: Online Course Assignment. In addition to the material from these assignments, the Final Project Assignment will also need objectives for each module and assignments/assignment instructions for each module.

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