Mapness is a travel journal tool that allows you to map out a trip and post pictures, video and text-based comments/descriptions along your route. Obviously, one way to use this would be to map out a trip that you have taken complete with pictures and videos you collected along the way. But for the k-12 classroom that particular application might not work so well since most teachers aren't taking too many trips with their students. However, you could use Mapness to map out trips of historical figures (Lewis and Clark come immediately to mind), historical events (the movement of the Union or Confederate army during the Civil War) or even the travels of fictional characters from a book your students might be reading. At this point, Mapness is still in beta so I'm guessing there may be some more features coming down the road, such as the ability to embed your travel map, but for now it seems to be fairly handy. It's a lot like using Google Maps with Picasa Web Album to plot out things on a map but the interface is more structured and geared towards mapping out a particular route rather than just geotagging images, videos and text on a map. You can share your travel map by giving others the link and it is currently free to sign-up and use.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Mapness!
Mapness is a travel journal tool that allows you to map out a trip and post pictures, video and text-based comments/descriptions along your route. Obviously, one way to use this would be to map out a trip that you have taken complete with pictures and videos you collected along the way. But for the k-12 classroom that particular application might not work so well since most teachers aren't taking too many trips with their students. However, you could use Mapness to map out trips of historical figures (Lewis and Clark come immediately to mind), historical events (the movement of the Union or Confederate army during the Civil War) or even the travels of fictional characters from a book your students might be reading. At this point, Mapness is still in beta so I'm guessing there may be some more features coming down the road, such as the ability to embed your travel map, but for now it seems to be fairly handy. It's a lot like using Google Maps with Picasa Web Album to plot out things on a map but the interface is more structured and geared towards mapping out a particular route rather than just geotagging images, videos and text on a map. You can share your travel map by giving others the link and it is currently free to sign-up and use.
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3 comments:
Excellent post,particularly given the historical possibilities.
Hi, I'm very happy you found Mapness useful - I'm a co-founder this service. We've been considering using Mapness as an educational tool for quite some time now. We'll be more than happy to cooperate if you (or anyone else involved in teaching) would like to help us make Mapness more useful for teachers, students or researchers. We're open to feedback, suggestions and collaboration possibilities (also pro bono) from people and organizations involved in education. If anyone is interested please use the contact form at http://mapness.net/feedback or email me directly at tom@mapness.net
If you are interested in this sort of service, we have a Travel Journal which is integrated into our global SIMs.
Our service can use the cell tower locations of where you use the SIM to automatically create a map. You can control who can see your tracked locations or even turn it off.
You can also post from the phone, or the web and use the website to place calls or send text messages.
We have a privacy system that lets you make content you post public, restricted to family and friends, or private to yourself.
In about a month we will be releasing a version that doesn't require one of our SIM cards and has most of the same functionality except for the automatic tracking.
More about our Travel Journal here:
www.ekit.com/ekit/tj
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