In my TE 402 class we had to complete a project that involved teaching about a different type of literacy in a new literacy format. The different types of literacy we could chose from were emotional, social, visual, cultural, environmental, and political literacy. We had to research these types of literacies to learn more about them. I was very interested in environmental literacy because i love geography (one of my teaching minors) and learning about why there are features and buildings where they are. I decided to explore interactive maps because I had seen from previous examples that one can take a Google map and personalize it to make the map their own. It took me some time to figure out how to make the map look the way I wanted, but after I figured out the little details the map was very easy to make! I could see myself using an interactive map in my classroom across many subjects! Students can create a map of the different stops travelers made along the Oregon trail to find land or students could locate different streets or places a character went in a book they are reading so they understand how far the character had to travel to get from one area to another! The map that I chose to do was looking at the locations of some coal-fired power plants and their distances away from state parks. I wanted to see if people thought about the locations of state parks before planting a coal-fired power plant that emits a lot of air pollution, which could end up killing off some plants and forcing animals to leave because of unhealthy conditions. Below is the link to the map I created. I encourage teachers to explore different types of formats to display information, especially through technology since it is becoming such an important feature in our classrooms.
Map!
