My World GIS :: Guided Tour

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My World GIS > About My World > Guided Tour

Here is a guided tour of My World. For more details, you can also check out these tutorials:

Web-based Tutorial

Video Tutorial

My World is Designed for Classrooms

My World's Welcome Window provides quick links to tutorials and help as well as online curriculum materials and data archives. You can author your own tours.

Project Library. My World comes pre-loaded with classroom-ready projects

Teaching Support. Teachers can customize projects to open with activity sheets to guide student thinking.

Compatible with School Computing Environments. My World has been designed for use in schools and has been widely tested. It works well on the computers that schools have today. It is compatible with security software, networked environments, and firewalls. My World runs under Windows, MacOS, and Linux with an identical user interface on all platforms.

Explore Global Data

Modes reduce complexity and help students understand the structure of the task.

Data Libraries are part of “Construct” mode, so users can easily drag datasets to the layer list without having to dig through the operating system.

Layers represent each type of data on the map and can be edited, reordered and hidden.

Selections display a new, permanent subset of each table. Users create selections visually or analytically.

… or Explore Local Data.

Links connect My World maps with photos, web pages, and movies. Click on the feature or the flag to open the link.

In Edit Mode students can create their own layers by drawing or importing data. They can create their own links to photos or other multimedia and add their own annotations and labels to their maps to share with others.

Access Data in Many Formats

Expandable Data Library. My World comes with a large library of geographic data, and it is easy to import new datasets. My World supports most standard GIS data formats. And the software provides built-in links to our ever-expanding online library of data sets.

Connect to Online Satellite and Aerial Image Servers. My World supports the Web Map Server (WMS) protocol, which allows you to access aerial and satellite photos dynamically over the web from servers including Microsoft's Terraserver, USGS Landsat server, and NASA Blue Marble. Like Google Maps and other popular online mapping services, My World dynamically updates the display of the layer as you zoom and move around, providing you with an image at the optimum resolution.

My World Supports Students in Quantitative & Database Analysis

Data tables underlie each layer, allowing users to sort, select, and add columns.

Analysis Mode provides a supportive interface to allow students to compute math operations on data, query data based on geographic relationships and data values, and do simple statistical analyses.

Plots and Graphs enable students to visualize data in line-plots, histograms or bar charts, and scatter plots.

Compare Maps

Child Windows. You can place two or more maps side by side to compare them by creating separate "Child Windows." Child Windows can be synchronized with the main window so that any time you zoom, pan, or click on a point in one window, the same thing happens in the other windows. Or, you can use an unsynchronized Child Window to show a large area while you zoom in on a portion of it in the main window. Child Windows also make it possible to view and sample several different grids at the same time. Child Windows are particularly useful for working with gridded (raster) data.

Named Views. This feature allows you to save a particular "view" within a mapview and return to it immediately at any time in the future. For example, zoom to Antarctica, turn off a few layers, and choose the variables to display. Then save it as the named view "Antarctica". Then go to Brazil and do the same thing. Immediately switch from the "Antarctica" view to the "Brazil" view using a pull-down menu at the bottom of the layer list. Or, change all the layers to display values for 1980. Save that as "1980". Then change all the layers to display values for 1990. Save that as "1990", and use the view menu to go back and forth.

Examples of My World In Action

The following images show screens from My World GIS. Click on an image to see it larger.

1. Looking at earthquake and volcano data for the Earth Structures activity

3. Example of using images, labels, and links

2. Finding a school in Chicago

4. Satisfying multiple constraints using Buffers and Spatial Intersection

5. Looking at the results of the 2004 Presidential general election (with histogram)

6. Contour lines generated by My World

Last Updated: 2007-03-28 11:08:29