Yesterday, I was poking around on Google Maps and noticed the Labs tab on the top right corner, so I clicked. What I found was a treasure trove for the social studies classroom. The first item on the list “Distance Measurement Tool” is probably my favorite.
First and foremost the tool lets you measure from one point to the next. This is very useful in helping your students understand scale and distance visually:
- How far is it from our school to your house? How big is our state? Country? The Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Pennsylvania?
- Example Assignment:
- What was the geographic significance of Philadelphia in the 13 original states? Measure the distance of Philadelphia to New York, Savannah, Boston, and Williamsburg; compared to the distance between New York and the cities listed.
So that is fun and straight forward, but come on let’s dial it up a bit. If you take a closer look at the distance measurement tool you will notice that you can measure in “Metric or English” units or click on “I’m feeling geeky” and let the social studies fun begin. Google will give you distance between two points in over 20 units of measurement (current and historical). Some of my favorites–the variety of ancient cubit measurements (Sumerian Nipur, Roman, Greek, Jewish 1st Temple, Jewish 2nd Temple, Jewish 2nd Temple Sacred, and the list goes on). The list also include the California Vara, the unit of measurement that the Spanish missionaries used to measure the distance between missionaries in the New World. This is a really fun tool, which can help students understand that the idea of precise measurements has been around since the beginning of civilization. Remember, this is also a great way to help student decode primary source documents, giving student the true sense of distance authors reference. There are plenty of calculators and conversation tables out there to tell you that 1 Sumerian Nipur Cubit = 20.4 inches but what does that mean to a high school student?
