Outline World Map
Teachers of world history, geography and even political science place a great deal of stock in their students knowing about the world in which they live by the end of the semester. It takes specialized tools to teach and then test for this kind of knowledge. That is why educational software products as well as publishers of maps and globes have specialized types of maps for these types of classes. These are maps of the world in which the only detail are the shapes of the continents and outlines of the countries. These templates are perfect for educators to use to draw their students into a more meaningful learning experience.
One of the ways that we as a culture gauge whether our students are well informed is based on their knowledge of the world. Even in our last presidential election, when a candidate did poorly knowing where a country was or the names of countries and their proximity to each other, that is counted as poorly educated and that hurt the candidates legitimacy as a leader. This is why teachers are putting more and more emphasis on the layout of the world.
This learning objective is more than just rote learning of country names and locations. It is the beginning of a larger learning objective of understanding world political, military and social movements and how these thigns effect our own development and national objectives. But before we can discuss, for example, how Iran relates to Iraq, it is important that all of the students know where these countries are. In order to speed up that learning curve, teachers often use outline world maps because the students quickly pick up on the missing information which makes them more conversant in the names and locations of civilizations of our world.
One way that teachers use outline world maps is in overhead projections of certain areas of the world. The students may be presented with just the outline version of the map and the teacher than then drill or interact with them about the countries shown, the location of their major cities and other important details about the country. The missing detail of the map inspires students to recall what they have learned. Then the outline map of the world is used again in testing situations in which the student is given a map template of the world with the instruction to fill in the missing information about each country.
The students benefit quite a lot from this kind of teaching. And teachers are grateful because using outline maps, they can get better achievement from their students.