Tools for Teachers to Create and Manage Interactive Maps

Using maps for teaching is a great way to increase engagement with kids in your classroom especially for subjects such as Geography. It also allows students to visualize and understand the world around them.

To make the use of maps in the classroom an exciting experience for every learner, you must enable students to create their own maps. Using these map creation tools you can easily create and manage interactive maps.

Wikia Maps

Wikia Maps is a map creation tool which offers two options for map creation. You can upload pictures of the maps you have made or can upload picture of historical map. You can also add placemarks to the image that you have uploaded. The first options is ‘real map’ that enables you to add map pins and the second option where you can create maps using your own images.

Google Maps for Education

Google Maps for Education is a perfect tool to stoke your students’ interest in geography with tools from Google. It provides resources to help teachers and students explore, create, and collaborate with mapping tools. Students studying geography are better equipped to understand how human and physical systems interact which allows them to make informed decisions based on that knowledge. 

Map Maker Interactive

Map Maker Interactive offers themes on which you can make custom map displays. With each team you can find subcategories; you can pick a theme and then choose a subcategory in that theme. National Geographic’s Map Maker Interactive also offers icons and drawing tool that you can use on the map.

ikiMap

ikimap is a free platform where you can create maps. You can use an entirely blank canvas to upload the maps and share the map publicly created on ikimap. However, you need to register first to create custom maps with this platform. Creating maps with ikiMap is really easy, simply pick a layer base layer and add custom placemarks ( You can also add your own placemarks). Placemark contains images, text, links as well as embedded videos.

Animaps

Animaps is a platform where you can create animated Google Maps. It enables you to create maps with markers that move, images and text. You can avail many benefits of using Animaps:

• Build tour of placemarks that plays according to specific time.
• Create colored shaped to contract and expand to showcase patterns.
• Import images from Facebook, Flickr and Picassa
• You can register on the website using Facebook to use this platform.

Visits

Visits is online tool for making a history timeline with different location and places using Google Maps and Flickr images. This tool enables users to use the available information on Google Maps and Flickr images to make a timeline. The events on timeline are represented by a sets of circles. Although it is a general purpose tool, it can have some interesting applications in making learning fun.

Scribble Maps

Scribble Maps is a tool where you can type and draw on maps. Zoom and search options are also available in the Scribble Maps tool. Users can zoom, draw circle, type text as well as draw box and they can doodle too. Maps build on Scribble maps can be embedded in the website or shared through email.

Quikmaps

Quikmaps is a wonderful map creation tool that enables users to type, draw, and insert icons using Google Map without having Google Account. Simply by dragging and dropping you can place the element. After creating maps on Quickmaps, you can share it via email or can embed in the site or blog.

MapFab

One of the biggest advantages of using MapFab over Google Maps is you do not need an account to create the custom maps. You can edit the maps, draw circles, line (can change the colors of line), polygons on the map even after publishing with the link you get.

These are just few tools that can be used to create engaging and interacting maps for your classroom activities. There are a lot of other popular tools like Map a List, World Map, Mapfaire, UMapper, Mapbox and many more which you can use.

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