This past summer, my friends and I—who’ve been close since our Peace Corps days—embarked on an unforgettable Alaskan adventure. But before we sailed by glaciers or stood in awe of Denali, I turned to my go-to planning tool: Google My Maps. Picture it as a customizable, interactive atlas where I could plot every must-see destination—Denali National Park, the Alaska Native Heritage Center, the Kenai Fjords glaciers—and organize them on a map. With every click, my map came to life, filled with notes, photos, and travel distances. The best part? I could share the map with my fellow travelers, who could contribute to the plan.
While most people are familiar with Google Maps for daily navigation, not everyone has explored its equally powerful siblings, Google Earth and Google My Maps. Google Earth takes you on an immersive 3D exploration of the globe, using satellite imagery to give a bird’s-eye view of any location on the planet. Meanwhile, Google My Maps is all about personalizing your mapping experience. It’s like a blank canvas where you can drop markers, draw lines, and create shapes to design custom maps. Whether you're planning a trip, highlighting favorite spots, or sharing important information, it helps you visualize and organize data in a way that’s uniquely yours.
Google My Maps is all about personalizing your mapping experience. It’s like a blank canvas where you can drop markers, draw lines, and create shapes to design custom maps.
I’ve seen firsthand how Google My Maps works wonders across different subjects. From charting Buck’s journey through the Alaskan wilderness in a Language Arts class to mapping out dream vacations in Spanish class, it’s a versatile tool that brings lessons to life. Recently, I teamed up with one of our school’s Social Studies for a project that had students take on the Eastern Hemisphere, one digital pin at a time. Students transformed into cartographers, marking and annotating key landmarks across their chosen countries. This slideshow outlines the project and can be used with students. I also describe in detail how to use Google My Maps for mapping a country in this video tutorial.
The first step in this activity was to have students choose a country in the Eastern Hemisphere. I encouraged them to select a country that sparked their interest, whether it was a place they’d always wanted to visit or one they had read about. Personal interest played a key role in motivating students to dive deep into their research. Once their country was selected, they began researching five significant locations. These could include famous landmarks, historical sites, cultural centers, or natural features like mountains or rivers. To guide their research, I provided a worksheet to help them organize their information.
After completing their research, the real fun began as students created their own maps in Google My Maps. Each map was titled with the student’s last name and their country’s name. Using the tool, they dropped pins to mark the locations they had researched. They could either search for the places by name or manually find them on the map and place the pins themselves. This exercise helped students visualize their findings geographically, adding a deeper understanding of the locations they had studied. To make their maps even more organized and visually appealing, students chose unique icons for each pin and color-coded the markers based on location types. For example, historical sites might be one color, while parks could be another. This not only made their maps easier to navigate but also reinforced their ability to categorize information effectively.
Once the pins were in place, students added short descriptions and images for each location. The descriptions were brief but informative, highlighting the significance of each place. I encouraged them to focus on key details that would allow viewers to quickly grasp the importance of the site. In addition to the text, students uploaded at least three images for each location—photos of the site itself, cultural activities, or even local foods. This multimedia approach made the maps more engaging, bringing the students' research to life in a visually compelling way.
To further reinforce geographic understanding and spatial awareness, students used the line tool in Google My Maps to draw their country’s borders. They traced the outline of the country, clicking along the perimeter until the shape was complete. This step helped them grasp the size and shape of their country in relation to the world map. Once they had the borders drawn, students could customize the color and transparency of the outline. Google My Maps even displayed the square mileage and perimeter of the shape, adding an extra layer of geographical learning.
There are plenty of ways to extend this project and challenge students even further. One option is to have students create maps based on specific themes, such as mapping historical events, cultural landmarks, or environmental features within their chosen countries. This allows them to focus on particular aspects and deepen their understanding. Another approach is to have groups of students collaborate on a regional map, with each student responsible for mapping a different country within that region. In Google My Maps, each student can create a separate layer for their country, making it easy to compare and contrast different locations within the same project. For more creative students, you can even encourage the inclusion of multimedia elements like videos, audio recordings, or custom drawings to enhance their presentations and bring their maps to life in new ways.
At its core, Google My Maps transforms a standard geography lesson into an engaging, interactive experience. By giving students the tools to create their own maps, research key locations, and share their findings with the class, they not only develop critical research and tech skills but also gain valuable experience in presenting their work. It’s a fun, dynamic way to bring geography to life with Google My Maps—without ever leaving the classroom.