Students could create the town map

Jeff Jarvis unintentionally suggests a great geography-citizenship project for students as we head back into a sunny school term here in Scotland, picking up on the fact that Chorley doesn't have a town map. Now I had a friend from uni - a fellow big band drummer in EUJO - who came from Chorley, so I know it exists and is generally populated by friendly northerners who would love nothing better than to show off their home. Here are some of Jarvis' highlight tasks:

• Google Maps to find the town
• Platial to let people fill in street names, addresses, and names
• Restaurant reviews and dangerous dogs plotted via Google Maps
• Soon businesses will be able to offer printable coupons via Google Maps
• Locals can report potholes, arrests and home prices
• Up My Street information can be linked in to help find the super school doing all this in their 21st Century classrooms.
• Students can create podcast tours about their home town (in foreign languages, of course)

Some of my added suggestions:

• Use a GPS locator to plot photographs geotagged to street addresses - you could create a virtual tour
• Check out the progress on the national geocaching project and tap into that.
• Map wifi hotspots so that others can log on to find out more in situe
• People can create overlays for Google Maps illustrating their favourite walks, maybe doing this in real time using Loic's gizmo.
• WorldMapper would help compare Chorley's birth rates and industrial figures to the rest of the industrial North.
  

Jeff would love to hear more of your ideas.

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Comments

[jason]

i went ahead and created an open map that anyone can add chorley places to, http://platial.com/map/9198

[David Noble]

Great post, Ewan. One of our class projects for next term (creating a podcast tour) will benefit greatly from some of these tools.

[Ewan McIntosh]

Let us know when they're live. It would be fun for students to compare each other's productions. I defintely see some students in East Lothian doing this kind of venture this year.