ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Education Community

GIS Day with Explorer in Corpus Christi, Texas

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:50:00 GMT

A total of 490 students plus teachers from 14 middle and high schools surrounding Corpus Christi, Texas, were hosted at Texas A&M by the University and Del Mar College on GIS Day. The City and local users of GIS gave presentations and demonstrated how their community is using GIS. ESRI showed ArcGIS Explorer and the students found their campus and vowed to download it as soon as possible. The picture below shows two teachers finding their school location using ArcGIS Explorer.

We only had about 5 minutes with each group of about 15 students – but they all “got it” right away and some didn’t want to leave the station. Wish I could have shown them more. We also had the Weather feed on live and NOAA was there so they could see the data at NOAA booth and see it in ArcGIS Explorer! I also quickly showed them how to make a presentation. I had to take weather off of the screen shot as it covered the city! Explorer was a big hit!

Contributed by:
Ann B. Johnson
Higher Education Program Manager

My National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer series concludes

bszukalski — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 GMT

If you've not been following along on the GIS Education Community blog be sure to check out George Dailey's series covering National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer. The 10-part post was inspired by the PBS special The National Parks: America's Best Idea and not only provides a great tour of parks, but also demonstrates how the unique capabilities of ArcGIS Explorer can be leveraged to do some really interesting things. Part 10 was recently published, and here's a handy reference to all of the posts.

Corny geography with ArcGIS Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:41:00 GMT

Mapping corn mazes using ArcGIS Explorer is one of the latest posts found on the GIS Education Community Blog. Written by ESRI education manager Joseph Kerski, the post covers adding data by importing text files to create an Explorer map showing the spatial distribution of corn mazes throughout the US, and then looking at the relationship of where corn is grown to where mazes are located. Cool!

My National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer Parts 2 and 3

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:58:00 GMT

George Dailey, ESRI Education Program manager, has published Part 2 and Part 3 of his continuing series on exploring America's National Parks using ArcGIS Explorer. You can check them out on the GIS Education Community blog.

Education Community: Exploring National Parks

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:21:00 GMT

In conjunction with the new PBS National Parks series, George Dailey's My National Parks and ArcGIS Explorer blog series begins today.

Yesterday we posted about how to add Yellowstone National Park's Old Faithful Web cam to your Explorer map, and we'll be following along with additional National Park topics.

ArcGIS Explorer CA wildfires eyes on the sky

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 05:56:00 GMT

A recent GIS Education Community blog post details a downloadable ArcGIS Explorer project with information on the ongoing California wildfires, including a live Mt. Wilson Web cam showing the current conditions.

Spatial distribution of students visualized via Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:52:00 GMT

ESRI education manager Joseph Kerski recently explained how he looks at the spatial distribution of class participants in a recent blog post on the GIS Education Community blog. The post explains how Excel spreadsheets are used to map the locations of students using Explorer's File Import capabilities.

Education Community posts on Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:18:00 GMT

There have been a few posts on the GIS Education Community blog that we think you'll find interesting.

In the most recent post George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, talks about mapping recycling sites with ArcGIS Explorer, and uses a list of recycling locations obtained from the City of Dallas Sanitation Services along with additional data downloaded from the University of Texas - Dallas. George uses ArcGIS Explorer's file import capabilities, the ability to read shapefiles directly, and geocoding and routing tasks to complete his project.

A second post by George highlights field trip planning using ArcGIS Explorer and uses its multi-stop routing capabilities to find the best way to get to the field trip destinations. George uses the Send To capabilities to use the geocoded museum and school location results as inputs to the Find Route task so solve the problem.

In another post covering GIS in education in Taiwan, ESRI Education Manager Joseph Kerski explores the country and imports his GPS track of his wanderings into Explorer, showing the vertical relief of the area and incorporating photos in popup windows.

Exploring Paragliding

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:13:00 GMT

There been a couple of post on the GIS Education Community Blog using Explorer for visualizing GPS tracks taken while paragliding. The first post uses data from a flight from Mount Herman, near Colorado Springs.

The second post shows what seems to be a daring glide from the Alyeska Ski Resort near the Cook Inlet in Alaska.

Data from both is intended to provide a lesson in GPS tracking and visualization, and is available at the ArcLessons Web site.

ESRI User Conference 2008 - Sunday Part I - The EdUC

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:49:00 GMT

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.

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.

GIS Education Community Explorer Posts

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:52:00 GMT

We've been busy, so have missed mentioning some interesting posts on the GIS Education Community Blog about ArcGIS Explorer. So let's catch up...

George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, published a series of Where's Geo? entries, covering his travels throughout the U.K. His third installment looked at UNESCO World Heritage Sites using lat/lon data from a text file and also finding a KML file of the sites.

If you've been using KML or KMZ in the latest release of Explorer (480), you've probably noticed the KML improvements and enhancements (which now include support for time series). The new features are discussed in the Working with KML or KMZ data Help topic.

Joseph Kerski used a GPS from his plane to create a track of his flight across the US in his post on Mapping An Airline Route.

Joseph used a utility to convert his waypoints to a shapefile for use in Explorer, but with the latest Explorer 480 he could have imported the GPX file from his Garmin directly. See the Importing GPS data files Help topic for more information.

Joseph also heads to the Crossroads of the World, traveling to Istanbul and using Explorer for an historical overview. Joseph uses Go to Location and the Pinkerton 1812 layer found under contents on the Explorer Resource Center.

And finally, George Dailey cruises the new ArcGIS Explorer 480 with Captain James Cook, checking out the newly added graticule and also the GeoNames Search.

More information about the graticule, reference grids, and other options can be found under Setting application options in the Explorer Help. And the GeoNames Search task can be found with others on the Explorer Resource Center.

Exploring Londinium

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:26:00 GMT

ESRI Education Manager George Dailey travels to London, and examines its history as Londinium using Explorer in a recent GIS Education Community blog post. In a subsequent post, George uses the Wikipedia Search task (found on the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center) to locate places of interest during his travels.

More Mars Exploration

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:44:00 GMT

A couple of posts ago we showed how to use content from the Geography Network and the USGS PIGWAD site to turn ArcGIS Explorer into a Mars Explorer.

George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, ups the ante and takes things further in a recent post on the GIS Education Community blog. We really like the use of both online and local content, and also popup photos from the NASA Photojournal site. Check out these cool screenshots.

Exploring a Midwest Earthquake Zone - Continued..

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:01:00 GMT

Last week we blogged about the first two parts of a four-part post on exploring the New Madrid seismic zone with ArcGIS Explorer. The final two chapters of the post have been completed, and are posted on the ESRI GIS Education Community blog.

Exploring a Midwest Earthquake Zone with Explorer

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:13:00 GMT

Part 1 and Part 2 of a four-part blog post featuring the use of ArcGIS Explorer for taking a closer look at the New Madrid Seismic Zone have been published on ESRI's GIS Education Community Blog. Posted by George Dailey, ESRI Education Manager, it's a great example of discovering and aggregating a variety of data and using Explorer to... well... explore!

Stay tuned for Parts 3 and 4.