Since it's Thursday again, I have yet another question about teaching tools.
I teach World History. My students are first year undergraduates from many different countries. This week I have learned the hard way that even 'obvious' historical facts, like say, what the Roman Empire was, is not obvious to all my students who after all come from all over the world.
I have found Google Maps an immensely useful tool. Now I can simply point to a place on the globe, and explain that during this period that empire ruled over roughly that territory.
There are of course several problems with this approach: The globe has modern states and modern borders on depicted on it, and my hand-waving is vague at best.
So my question is, is there some kind of historical globe that I can use? Ideally one where I can set the date and show (roughly) what the world looked like during various periods of time. I know several computer games by Paradox can do this, but booting up EU IV in class is hardly professional (aside from not being 100% accurate).
The website GeoCron is a good place to start. You can skip to any year and it will show you roughly what the world looked like. It is not entirely accurate at some points, like sometimes the author just places a circle and the name of the civilization where he may not have much information. However, it is a good place to start and gives a good visual of empires, the first civilizations, and the such.
Of course, more detailed maps can be used in collaboration with GeoCron to give your students a better understanding. I have found Euratlas to be a decent sources for maps of different European regions in 100 year increments. So a bit of big stretches between maps, but decent if it has one near the year you are interested in.
Chapel Hill has the Ancient World Mapping Center. It's a little tricky to use - I've been able to generate maps for one of my chapters, but I haven't figured out how to get a persistent link and I have no bloody clue what the citation will be. Right now they're jpgs of screenshots. Should be fine for lecture though.
Sometimes the names of places are tricky. I think it prefers Rubico to Rubicon for some reason; some other places prefer to use the Latin or Greek forms in idiosyncratic ways. Probably fine for your needs though.
Google Earth has a timeline feature in the top bar. It only goes back to the 1940's in most cases and generally only in urban centers.
It uses early aerial photography from the 1930's to the late 1990's, at which point satelite imagery kicks in. The oldest shots are in Texas around Spindletop, mapping oil fields.
I use it to research & demonstrate growth and historic context of neighborhoods we do projects in. You can literally pick a spot, scroll back & forth watching change happen decade by decade.
I find that Talessman's Atlas maps are very good for teaching about the ancient and medieval periods indeed. Hope they can be of some use for you, too!
This isn't directly tied to what you're asking, but I've taught using Google's news labs tools -- basically, News Labs is a way to bring together several Google projects with tutorial help to show data or build map sets. Here's the link: https://newslab.withgoogle.com/process/report
What's interesting is that Google Earth actually has some historical satellite data from LANDSAT and other sources -- it obviously doesn't go back to, say, Rome, but it can be useful to show change over time. Here's their lesson on that. For example, when I was teaching in Kazakhstan I showed their time lapse of the Aral Sea and how you could embed/share that (here's a link).
I have this bookmarked. I'm not totally sure how factually correct everything on there is, but it makes a very solid impression. Edit: Seems to go back only to year 0. Still very detailed and lots of additional information
The wall chart of world history was really fun and informative as a kid.