If you are looking for a few ways to have students make a quick digital choropleth map, you might consider the following options:

• Piktochart (A favorite of mine)
  • Log in to store your maps.
  • Choose regions of the world you want to work with.
  • Change color schemes and edit data easily.
  • If you want to print at a high quality or in PDF, you will need to pay 🙁

• MapChart.net
  • Allows you to quickly choose a region, click on color/right-click remove, add a legend, and add country names.
  • You don’t input your own data using Mapchart, so you need to have that all figured out somewhere else (like a piece of paper).
  • You can save the map to .PNG only, but the download is high quality.
  • They also have historical map sets available.

• GeoAwesomeness ran a tutorial on how to create a choropleth map in Excel HERE. I was running an older version of Excel on my Mac and for some reason, could not find the store option that they are talking about, though I know if I did more digging, I would find it.

• ArcGIS online (free education) does NOT seem to have an option to edit a preexisting map layer that you import, but can more than likely find one you want, that is already made.

• Datawrapper.de is promising as it allows you to set the range of categories, but it appears that the output for maps is best for the web so that they are interactive when you mouse-over a country.
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If you are a Google user, Google Sheets’ features are seemingly very easy to use. I inserted some quick data and created a map chart easily. You can customize the colors, but it appears that your data will automatically be categorized as equal intervals. 

• Pixelmap Generator is very easy to use and pretty! But there doesn’t seem to be a place to enter data, so you will need to figure all of this out on paper and then decide which areas you want colored. You can download it in SVG format which is nice if you’re working with vectors images.

• Excel: Thanks to our friends at Geoawesomeness, they provide a thorough tutorial on making a choropleth map in Excel. I’m sure the process is similar to Google Sheets, but handy if you are in love with Microsoft.

To find out more about teaching your students the difference between equal frequency and equal interval, check out the IllustratedTextbook’s page.

Happy mapping!!!