ESRI's User Conference has grown into several concurrent conferences in one. One of the intra-conferences that started today is the Education User Conference. Here's a look at some of the Explorer highlights from today's opening presentation.

Derrick Burke showed some of the interesting ways Explorer can be used by Educators. The theme of the opening revolved around history, and Derrick started by using the new Quick Content task (with eye catching blinking eyeballs) to examine the history of the US, and how cartography has evolved. Here's the Pinkerton 1912 layer from the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center, along with the unique cartography of the 1833 map of the US. Both are from the David Rumsey collection.

Here Derrick has added the 1783 boundary in green, the Louisiana Purchase boundary in orange, and all US cities in 1810. The popup shows the population. At that time Philadelphia had a population of just over 87,000.

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The BioBlitz projects are popular among educators, and here is the results of a BioBlitz shown using Explorer. Each observation includes popups of the name of the observed species, a photo, or in this case a photo and a sound - a scream Eeeeek! Ok, it might be corny, but kids (and educators) love it.