Looking at maps in textbooks or lectures is a fundamentally different experience from creating a map yourself…when I was making my first mapping project, I had to really wrestle with the map.
–Student in “HIST 3401: Early Latin America
to 1825” at the University of Minnesota
One thing I have found very common when it comes to history is a fascination with maps. During one class I had a couple days ago, my teacher was discussion Middle Earth from Lord of the Rings. He stated that even before he read the epic at hand, he would spend hours looking at the map of Middle Earth. I can relate to this, as during my time as a history student I would spend countless hours looking at maps, and graphs in my textbooks and online. But as the quote states, reading a map is way different than making a map.
Story Maps provides a smoother entry point for instructors and students to apply spatial thinking to their disciplines. Rather than relying on maps alone, the platform contains familiar elements, such as text and images, that make it more appealing to new users.-Saladin/Crosson
In their article, Spatial Approaches to the Past: Story Maps in the History Classroom, Christopher Saladin and Shana Crosson discuss the importance of story maps in the classroom. Story maps are very helpful to students because they allow students to almost jump right into a topic. A personal example is one that I did for my American History class. Each student in the class was assigned a specific state and then you would begin a journey of mapping out different Civil Rights events across the state. After it was over, I personally learned about a lot of events which I have never heard of before, while creating a map for others to learn too.
Every student also mentioned that the projects took much more time than they expected. Because they were reading closely for new types of information, working with multiple media formats,
and doing all of this in a new technology-Saladin/Crosson
This quote was once again relatable to my own personal experience with story maps. While I thought the map wouldn’t take too long, it was a lengthy process. The tools we used to edit these maps took some getting use to with regards to map layout and how to put pictures on the maps as well as placing videos on the map as well. Overall, the story map was very useful and it was a great learning experience that I am in support of for future classrooms.
