First, collect your “raw materials.” That means you should have a list of locations, and for each location, you should have one photo and a short paragraph (a few sentences max). Your locations can be general (city, state, country) or specific (a street address, followed by the city, state, country).

On paper or in your head, put your locations in order: Which will you present first? Where do you go after that? And after that? …

Then, log into your Gmail account. [You may need a “true” Gmail account – not your GMU account. StoryMap automatically logs you in, using your Gmail account. You don’t create a separate account with StoryMap.

Then, go to http://storymap.knightlab.com/ and click on “Make a storymap now.”

StoryMap then asks if you want to create a map or a Gigapixel. Go with the map:

Give your map a title. For this test, I am doing a map of ethnic groups in China.

The first slide is your title slide. Give the title slide of your StoryMap a broad headline and a short introduction:

… and upload a photo, too:

Give your photo a cutline. Then, save.

Now, add a slide. Here’s where you get specific. StoryMap wants to know the first location that you want to zoom in on.

When you add a slide, StoryMap will put a marker somewhere on the map. Don’t worry; you’re going to tell StoryMap exactly where the marker goes. A search box will appear on the screen. Type (or paste) into the search box your location information. For my map, I’m just using cities and provinces, like “Xinjaing, China”. As you type, StoryMap will suggest matches. And when you select the location you want . . .

… StoryMap will put the marker there:

I’ll give that slide a headline (Xinjiang is where the Uighur people live), a little text and photo. Then I add a slide for an ethnic group in Yunnan Province:

And again, I give the slide a headline, text and photo:

You can see that so far, for all of my slides, I’m zoomed out way too far. So I’ll zoom in on Yunnan Province (and StoryMap will adjust all of the other slides accordingly):

‘

If I then click on the icon for the title slide, I see:

In other words, StoryMap has adjusted the opening view as well.

So, I’ll add one more slide, for the Man (or Manchu) people in Jilin Province:

If I click on the icon for the title slide again, now I see three points. This view is the editing view. Click on the “preview” link . . .

… to see what your map would like like on the Web. Here’s the title-page view:

You can click through the map to each location:

At any point, viewers can click on the “map overview” link to see all of the locations on your map:

And they can go back to the very beginning:

To share the map with other people, click on the “Share” button in the top right corner of your preview screen. For this, you grab the embed code: