A Support System to Browse Web News using Google Maps for Elementary School Children in Japan

Education that takes advantage of the newspaper as teaching materials called NIE (Newspaper In Education) is attracting attention in many elementary schools around the world. In general, teachers often take up the features and the events of familiar areas for school children as a learning theme in NIE. School children search and study articles related to those areas. In elementary schools in Japan, children start map learning on the third or fourth grade. Therefore, we focus on the map as an interface to browse Web news. This paper proposes a support system to browse Web news which are provided on Google Maps. By displaying Web news in the map, children can visually browse news articles in various areas. The target users of our system are students on the third and higher grades of elementary schools in Japan.