Frappr was just posted on the TAWL list. They’re using it to map the locations of list members, but it got me to thinking of lesson options. Students mapping their extended families. Mapping literary authors. Mapping important locations for a historical period (e.g., the Dust Bowl).

So I got to thinking about a Flash interactive that allowed us to pass whatever background we need via xml. Students choose locations for the markers and write associated descriptive text. In ways it’s just an annotation tool. Perhaps the background could be a graphic of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the markers are features in the text that the student is explaining.

I think the functionality would be relatively simple to develop, because we have tools that do similar things. Dragging the bubbles and creating related text is no different in function than dragging the text tags for the Venn or Plot Diagram. The background could be passed with xml, as we pass in text for the Guided Tour. Or at the worst, we’d have subfolders for each new version (a la the Graphic Map).

I’m hoping to investigate the options on this. Could be a cool tool that wouldn’t take long to develop.