Ideas Worth Sharing: If It Were My Home

My blogging inspiration, Sarah at Math = Love, is starting two new series on her blog.  The first is called Stuff Worth Sharing, and the intent is to share internet resources that she has found to be helpful.  

I really like the idea, especially for German teachers because we are often the only German teacher in a particular school so there isn't a colleague next door teaching the same thing to bounce ideas off of.  Also,German internet resources are not as plentiful as resources for other subjects, but there are some good ones out there.

In fact, this one just showed up in my Twitter feed the other day, courtesy of NPR's Morning Edition, and it's great!  The site is called IfItWereMyHome.com, and it allows you to compare the size of countries around the world with your home country.  

Here you can see I've placed Germany on top of Indiana.  It's bigger, but not that much.  

Often in discussions with my students about car ownership, public transportation, or housing in Germany, it becomes clear that they don't have a good sense of the difference in population density between the Midwest and Germany.  This site gives them a concrete image of the relative sizes of the U.S. and Germany.  I definitely plan to use it with my first year students next year.