Looking for some more interactive, online resources – here’s one that will keep your and your students engrossed for hours. Titled Change the world one map at a time, this resource lets you select a subject from the top menu and watch the countries on the map change their size. Instead of land mass, the size of each country will represent the data for that subject –both its share of the total and absolute value.

I can see heaps of potential for this in classes – another good example of data visualisation for the classroom. Apart from the obvious approach of simply exploring the map and noting what is revealed, this sort of thing sets itself up nicely for a lot of predictive questionning – then using the map to discover what the pattern is, for example…

• which countries have the most children? how does that compare with their overall population?
• how many of these kids go on to primary, secondary, tertiary education?
• where in the world do they use nuclear energy to generate electricity? Hydro-power generation? etc.
• if uranium is required to generate nuclear electricity, where can that be found?

Extending beyond this is the opportunity to consult secondary sources of information to understand how accurate this visualisation tool is. Thanks to Mapping Worlds for this great resource!