Where Did You Say You Were From?

Adding another curricular area into a context is wonderful when not planned. Now that is what happened when I introduced ClustrMaps onto my school blog site to find out where in the world people were visiting our site.

It became immediatley clear that my Geography skills were not one of my strengths as I found it hard to name various locations as the map only shows a map - no labels. Normally I would not pursue my ignorance, however, curiosity as to where in the world people were hitting on our site made me pull the 'globe that lights up' from the children's cupboard and match the red spots to readable locations on the globe.

The excitement of realising that someone in Tokyo was on our site and that I could remember the location when I returned set me typing a new blog at RadioHigh asking the children to start naming new locations as they appear on the map. Making this a game with the possibility of winning school house points has opened up a new curricular area in our blog that was not intentional. The children are now looking at the map, with interest, and locating marked areas as they have a desire to find out who their world wide audience are.

If you have a school blog, go and create a clustrmap now to develop your pupils', and possibly your own, mapping skills. It has worked for me I can now point out where Helsinki is - now that is a first.