Education today has become interactive where the students need to be active learners rather than sitting idly and cramming up their lessons. If you teach geography and are still using the age old methods of maps and charts, it's time to use digital tools like interactive maps to spice up your lessons and hold the attention of your students. In case you are still wondering how to do it, here are some cues.

Interactive maps of every continent, state and country are available. So, whether you want to teach about the geography of various countries in Europe and compare the same, wish to discuss about basic geographic, population and dwelling data of the provinces of China or any other region in Asia, interactive maps can help.

Most interactive geography maps these days come equipped with the geo-search feature. Using this feature, you can easily find any place on the map, see its actual location and check the surroundings (be it the neighboring countries, rivers, or mountains etc). Apart from knowing more about the geographic conditions of your chosen location as well as its longitude and latitude, you can also use the feature for map plotting and to know a few things about the population of that place.

^New! Online Google Map Editor. Try Now (no download required) Try our new Google map editor with street addresses (geocoding) support. Build your own custom Google maps, add points of interest and speech bubbles in just a few clicks.  

In case you want to use some demographic and economic variables to compare the changes in some specific regions, custom-designed interactive maps can help. These maps are based on matching themes and can help you select regions based on the desired parameters, thus enabling you to track changes over time using multiple datasets. Teaching your students more about the crop production of a particular location or how to compare the pasture/rangeland conditions among regions of Asia, Africa and Europe can also be done seamlessly using interactive maps that combine GIS and remote sensing to offer timely and reliable data. No wonder that interactive maps can make the lessons interesting even when you are dealing with seemingly stale statistics of farming and agriculture data.

Some interactive maps come loaded with quizzes that can be related to the world scenario (Map Quiz about World Mountain Ranges or World Lakes etc), or a specific continent like Africa (pertaining to seas, rivers, oceans and lakes in and around the region), or Europe (quizzes about lakes, rivers and bays; capitals of European counties, etc). With the help of such quizzes, testing the geography knowledge of your class would become a cakewalk and fun - all at the same time.

By accessing a variety of interactive maps to suit the lessons that you plan to discuss on a particular day, you can create an interest in your students about geography and encourage them to dig deeper on their own to complement their classroom knowledge.