This is an excellent tool to let your students challenge their knowledge of Canadian Geography. Before taking a quiz, the user has to choose a subject such as economy, ecology, pre-confederation history, post-confederation history, shapes of Canada, land or people. The user can also choose the level of difficulty (easy or difficult), the number of questions and the time limit to complete the quiz. This could also be used with a projector or Smartboard to host a game with the entire classroom.

The Atlas of Canada presents Facts About Canada. This website includes information about lakes, islands, rivers, parks, weather, waterfalls, glaciers, mountains and coastlines. There is also a list of Frequently Asked Questions About Canada. It is a great site to explore Canadian geography or to prepare a trivia game for your classroom.

This site present many interactive maps and it lets the student explore various regions of the world where people speak Spanish and other languages. There are many maps available for various communities, cities and countries, all in Flash. The maps are entirely interactive and ideal for working at the computer. In these maps, the students have to identify countries, landmarks, rivers, oceans, lakes and regions. There are also some puzzle to solve .

101 creatively simple ways to teach Geography is simple a PowerPoint presentation with ideas of things to do in your geography class to engage your students. The ideas are not meant for specific content, but could be used for almost any content of your geography course. In fact, they are teaching and learning strategies that you could even use in others courses by adapting them. I especially like the one where you get the students to name a country and capital while taking the attendance and a contest out of it!

Two days ago, I was presenting a great blog with lessons on how to use Google Earth in the classroom. Earth Album is also another amazing resource to help your students to discover the world by mixing the power of maps on Google Earth and the power of photography on Flickr. When visiting the Earth Album website, it almost look like you are consulting the Google maps website or the Google Earth Application. However, when you enter the name of a location, not only will it zoom on the satellite map, but it will also provide a stripe with many photos taken at this location. The photos are pulled from the Flickr database according to their geolocation coordinates. You can then further your search by adding keywords of the type of image you want to see at this location. As an example, the photo included in this blog entry is from Paris France and the keyword is “city”. So that is two great websites merged in one great tool!

Maps4free is a great resource for geography teachers. It is a database of all the countries from A to Z. When clicking on a country, a page of the country appears on the screen including a map, some background information about it, a lot of detailed geographic information, information about people (such as population, age structure, age, growth rate, birth rate, death rate, sex ratio, nationality, languages, HIV, etc.)

There is also information about the governement, the economy, communications, transportations, military and other issues. There is also a picture of the national flag. It is a great resource for students doing research project on a country.

If you are teaching American geography, this “50 United States Quiz” is for you and your students. It includes over a 1000 multiple-choice questions that are presented randomly. The questions are available in the following categories: State Capitals, Bordering States, State Nicknames, State Flowers, State Birds, State Trees, State Induction Dates, State Sizes, Presidential Birthplaces, Historical Parks, National Parks, Bodies of Water, State Populations, Cities and Towns, and Famous Places. The look of the website is very simple and plain, sometimes too much. In addition, the buttons are not intuitive. They are using radio button (usually for options) instead of the regular “OK” or “Continue” button. However, once the user gets used to the odd interface, the quiz is a lot of fun.

MapMachine is a great resource available through the National Geographic website. You can get road map and satellite views of the earth, but it is more than your regular map website such as mapquest or google maps. It also provides a physical map showing the landscape as well as theme maps. The most interesting feature of this map website is the collection of theme maps. They are very useful for teaching geography. The theme maps include population density, habitats, natural resources, vegetation, mining, farming, natural disasters and weather. The picture on the left shows a map of the earthquakes on the west coast of the United States. The application also includes the usual feature such as the possibility to drag the map or zoom in and zoom out.