Online Geography Resources for Middle School

Even though you are missing your students right now, remote learning is a perfect time to explore world geography! Wait! How does that work when we aren't in a classroom? Well, there are so many online geography resources for upper elementary and middle school that are perfect for remote learning and beyond!

Google Earth Stories

Google Earth makes it easy for students to create and share their own geography discoveries and collaborate with their classmates. Simply navigate to Google Earth and click the Project icon to start creating! Students can put placemarks in places they've been or studied. They can also enhance their projects with their own images or Creative Commons images found online. Google gives step by step instructions and special tips on how to get started with Google Earth Stories!

Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego?

Remember the show, "Carmen Sandiego"? Well, now your learners can explore the world with detective Carmen's clues via Google Earth. Begin the chase and have your students get their first geography detective assignment! Your sleuths will gather clues while learning more about Google Earth tools and geographic locations to solve these fun, engaging mysteries!

Sing About Geography

Even middle schoolers love learning by song! Share some videos via Google Classroom, Seesaw, or One Drive that review important geographical places and concepts. Check out the video about the world's five oceans. After the video, they'll be able to take a short quiz to assess what they've learned. Next, help your students remember the seven continents. Antarctica's little tune will make you giggle! Like the previous video, students can take an assessment, discuss, or read more about the continents. As an added bonus, have your students create their own silly geography song to help memorize or practice a skill. Flipgrid is an easy place to record videos and share with the whole class.

Geography Videos

If you want to share a video with your students besides silly songs, try the online resource video library from National Geographic. This link will take you to geography videos for grades 4-8, but there are also lesson plans and other science and social studies-related topics your students will be excited to learn and discuss.

GeoGuessr

GeoGuessr is a free online that lets your students guess a location in the world displayed via street view. It's a difficult puzzle, but students will become familiar with their surroundings through images of landmarks, geographical locations, and more. GeoGuessr Pro gives unlimited access to all the games without ads, but GeoGuessr is so much fun to take for a spin for free!

Seterra

Seterra calls itself the "Ultimate Map Quiz Site". Test your students' knowledge of geography with geography concept quizzes like latitude and longitude as well as quizzes over countries, capitals, landforms, bodies of water, and so much more. Quizzes cover every country and region in the world, so you can assign them based on your unit of study or just have students explore for fun.

A View from Above

Have your students view incredible satellite images and take quizzes to guess where in the world they're at! Similar to GeoGuessr, instead of showing a street view, this is a "view from above". This site also gives choices for students to select from when determining the place they are viewing from above.

Mental Mapping

Sheppard Software has various maps to help your students practice mental mapping. First, have your students review a full map of the region or country they are studying. Next, have them draw a map and try to label the places you'd like them to recall. Finally, have them visit this site to review and see if they recall the places on their mental map. Repeating this process will help your students with world geography and mapping! Use the whiteboard tool on Zoom to help your students practice mental mapping together!

Share and Collaborate

Even though most of your learners are stuck at home, allow them to share past travels or where their families or ancestors come from on Google Classroom, Seesaw, OneDrive, or even on Zoom or Google Meet! Show and tell isn't just for elementary kids. Have them bring something that's important from their own personal geography. Consider having students share something they've learned from the activities during your online meetings. Remote learning is the perfect time to practice geography skills. Have your students explore places around the globe via Google Earth tools, dive into geography trivia, check out world maps, and review with mental mapping. These online geography resources for middle school will get your middle schoolers (or even upper elementary students) excited about learning about the world they live in.