History lessons can often get boring mainly where students have to go on cramming dates and years of important historical events. You will know it better if you are a teacher of history and find it difficult to hold the attention of your class. In case you are wondering about how to make the history lessons more interesting and increase the fun quotient, try using interactive maps.

Interesting Lesson with Interactive Maps and Virtual Walkthroughs

Whether you want to take your students on a walking tour of the Sumer civilization or wish to let your students know the route taken by Hiuen Tsang during his journey from China to India, you can get your students involved with the use of interactive maps. With pop up text, zoom in facility and roll over boxes offering additional information about specific areas of the map, you can even go beyond the prescribed text to discuss a few relevant matters in class, thus making the history lessons seem like taking a few steps back in time. Imagine how thrilling it would be to take a virtual walk past the maze of lanes and by-lanes of Babylon, use relevant symbols to find out the location of drinking water wells, bathing houses, and sewage drains etc to understand the highly sophisticated system of waste removal in those days. Rather than cramming up stale text, such interactive learning would make students more interested in following the lessons and retain the details for life.

History Quiz and Assignments with Maps

Many interactive maps also come packed with student quizzes, which can create a competitive atmosphere in the class and test how much every student has learned from the lessons and the maps. So, whether it's the historical facts of Africa, Europe, or Asia, your students can test their mettle using the quizzes. These maps can also be created by student themselves to present in projects or presentations. They can be saved as image maps, or integrated them with web pages and blogs (WordPress, Drupal etc) as part of their assignments.

Handy Maps for Historic Reseach

Interactive maps can come handy for research related to various historical events. Apart from bringing digital history to your doorsteps through timeline, graphics, symbols and texts (via pop-up and roll-over boxes), many of these maps also have links to various historical societies (local, national and international). Some interactive maps offer a valued added service by integrating research tips to help students and teachers dig more into a specific aspect of the historical event or location in order to come up with more interesting facts. Be it the first opium war in China, or Storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, you can explore many details using interactive maps.

Interactive maps can act as a great resource to make history lessons fun and interesting, apart from helping in research related work. If you haven't used it yet, it's time to let your students use these maps as a great starting point for amassing