Peer Review

StoryMap JS

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Mar 15, 2020 by Teacher Education

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

StoryMapJS is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It is a new tool, yet stable in our development environment, and it has a friendly authoring tool. StoryMap comes in two variants. The classic version of StoryMapJS works with standard web maps. Add a slide for each place in your story--setting the location is as easy as a text search for the name, address, or latitude and longitude. Tell your story in text and easily add rich media -- images, videos, tweets, wikipedia pages, and much more. You can change the visual style of your map with a few presets, or you can use Mapbox to create your own style. StoryMapJS can also tell stories with large photographs, works of art, historic maps, and other image files. Because it works best with pixel-dense files, we call these "gigapixel" StoryMaps. Learn more.

Type of Material:

Collection

Recommended Uses:

Projects, homework, learning content, supplements to lecture content

Technical Requirements:

Internet connect, images and text to create your map

Identify Major Learning Goals:

There are no strict learning goals, but rather the tool allows users to create content to support a variety of learning goals.

Students will be able to: Create web-based story maps using an online development tool

Target Student Population:

Middle School, High School, College General Ed, College Lower Division, College Upper Division, Graduate School, Professional, Grade School

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

None, though having a basic understanding of maps and organizing visual content is helpful.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:: The introduction describing the tool is very promising. There are a few good examples of how the tool could be used. The tool allows users to present their content in a way that supports advanced learning of the target topic.
Concerns:: The instructions on how to use the tool were not always clear. It would be helpful if clear tutorial materials were included. The frequently asked questions did not help one reviewer get started and make effective use of this tool. The link to the example “The Times” did not work.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

The materials created by Story Map JS are limitless, allowing for the creation of learning objects that can easily be incorporated into myriad learning contexts.

This concept of making web-based story maps with interactive elements is a great concept. Tools that integrate social studies, language arts, technology, etc. are very relevant and needed in teacher education.

Concerns:

Because the heart of the interface is focused on using geographical maps, there may be limited use cases for those seeking to implement their tool for their discipline.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

StoryMap JS has a simple and clear set of navigation tools within their editor that will have folks creating maps quickly and easily from the very first time they use the application. The web-based interface makes it simple to use the tool on the go, and to quickly share out resources with students.

It was easy to create an account by signing in with Google.

Concerns:

For those looking to bring in custom maps, the process of saving out the files, hosting the files, and bringing in an external link can be a bit cumbersome for beginner technology users.

Other Issues and Comments:: This app is a project of the Knight Lab at Northwestern university which is a team technologists and journalists working at advancing news media innovation through exploration and experimentation. It is not clear when the tool was last updated, but there is a link to report problems.
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