The first thing that comes to mind is that these functions are great for teaching physical and political geography in a history class. When teaching both World and American History, I have used these functions to have kids identify political and physical features of different parts of the world (topography: mountains, lakes, rivers, resources). We have used maps to as well to study topics such as colonizer and colonized; indigenous tribes; battle site locations and we’ve used them to identify and analyze national and regional election returns and voting patterns. I also really like the idea of using these tools to post an image (a political cartoon, photograph etc) and have the kids identify the context, audience, purpose and point of view of the source their analyzing. These are skills they need to be proficient in when taking their end of year assessments..
