GIS Education Community Blog

During this academic year, ESRI and the Colorado Geographic Alliance (COGA) collaborated to conduct five professional development institutes for educators focused on the integration of GIS and GPS technology and methods in primary and secondary education. The collaboration was a natural one, as both COGA and ESRI have a keen interest in inquiry-based learning and the use of geotechnologies to enhance the acquisition of rich content and 21st Century skills. COGA, one of the original state-based geographic alliances established by National Geographic during the 1980s, is coordinated by two professors from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, Dr Steve Jennings and Dr Rebecca Theobald. Esther Worker and I from the Denver ESRI office have been working with COGA for over a decade. Joining the four of us was John Martin, a secondary school teacher and consultant who has been using GIS and GPS in his classrooms for many years.

Each institute was one day in length and was conducted in five different schools around Colorado. The first institute focused on Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) in collaboration with the Colorado Community College System, attracting 55 participants and guest speakers. The institutes provided hands-on experience with the tools, as well as opportunity to discuss how and why to teach with and teach about GIS and GPS. Each morning session included an introduction to geographic analysis, an introduction to COGA, a set of activities with GIS on the web (ESRI’s Mapping for Everyone, National Atlas, WorldMapper, This Dynamic Planet) and with GIS on the desktop (plate tectonics, sea level changes, and demographic analysis). Each afternoon included data collection with GPS, mapping and analysis of the field data using ArcGIS desktop and ArcGIS Explorer, and a discussion of standards and next steps.

The participants valued the combination of discussion and hands-on experience, and the fact that the workshops were nearby, as many districts lack travel funds. We found that tailoring the data and lessons to the locations where we taught, such as ski area site selection and studying local community demography, was worth the effort. ArcGIS Online was easily used for local base maps. Conducting the institutes in schools and the diversity of grade levels and disciplines represented sent an affirming message that GIS can be easily used in schools and modeled collaboration and interdisciplinary learning. The COGA coordinators will be publishing a research study based on the results of the pre- and post-institute surveys filled out by the participants. The combination of secondary education, higher education, and industry represented by the teaching team proved to be effective and we look forward to future collaboration.

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

Classroom science teachers - be sure to catch "The Urban Tree Project" in the February issue of The Science Teacher by Michael Barnett, Meredith Houle, Elizabeth Hufnagel, Alexander Pancic, Mike Lehman, and Emily Hoffman.

"Geospatial technologies have emerged over the last 15 years as one of the key tools used by environmental scientists (NRC 2006). In fact, educators have recognized that coupling geospatial technologies with environmental science topics and scientific data sets opens the door to local and regional scientific investigations (McInerney 2006). In this article, the authors describe the use of geographic information system (GIS) technologies and computer modeling to engage students in determining the economic and ecological value of trees in their neighborhoods while participating in the Urban Tree Project."

Details available from the National Science Teachers' Association

A new set of draft standards has been released. The Common Core Standards are a result of work by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. The vision has been to identify a set of capacities that almost all states can agree to. Forty-eight states plus DC and a few territories have contributed to this effort. Rather than lists of discipline-specific content, the emphasis is on skills that contribute to "college and career readiness." It is an important effort, and the public is encouraged to comment, at http://www.corestandards.org.

Meanwhile, last week I visited a tiny school that is already doing its part to get its students ready for college and career. In Augusta, Wisconsin, ten miles east of Eau Clair, the three educators at Wildlands School serve about 45 students in grades 7-12. Project-based learning is the model, all day long, with both individual and group projects. Many of these engage GIS.

During my visit, I saw a group project in which students had mapped squirrel nests by location, tree species, tree height and diameter, and surroundings; students used math to determine the tree height and nest height, and looked at densities of nests in different densities of different tree species. A ninth-grade student was doing solo work mapping farm fields, in advance of a local wetland reclamation study by a group. Another student showed his maps of individual fish that had been tagged and were being followed from above, by boat in the fall, and thru the ice over winter. The lake was being affected by the quality of the water flowing off the fields, which were affected by the little micro-environments.

Projects gave rise to other projects, and students had an endless array of fascinating content to handle. Under the eyes of skilled, knowledgeable, and committed educators, these students are already doing school in the manner sought by many promoting education reform. The students are productive, in groups and independently. They seek data, combine it into information, explore it in different ways, and act on it. The atmosphere is comfortable, but focused, and on task. They weave constantly back and forth between subjects, working with the staff to ensure they meet state goals, but zeroing in on elements of school that are of greatest importance to them. Graduates of the program, who learned they control their future, have headed off to college, and to jobs, and have done well.

It is heartening to see examples where school is a place of instruction and discovery, hands-on and minds-on, all day long, and that GIS plays a powerful role in providing challenge, opportunity, and context for learning, in readying youth for both college and career.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Co-Manager, ESRI Schools Program

Have you ever wanted to get away from it all?  Recent research by the European Commission and the World Bank on travel time to major cities of the world yields fascinating patterns when used in a GIS environment. The resulting map shows “out of the way” places—far from cities of 50,000 or more people.

Use this data to explore remoteness (according to the data, only 10% of the land area is remote in terms of being more than 48 hours from a large city) and density (95% of the people live on 10% of the land). Discuss the concept of accessibility—economic, physical, and social, manifested in access to markets, schools, hospitals, energy, or water. How is accessibility a precondition for the satisfaction of needs? Consider accessibility from the scale of local development to global trade.

As with any map, you should examine how and why it was made. The website describes the spatial data layers and cost-distance model used to create it. The model not only includes cities, but also roads, railways, shipping lanes, national boundaries, slope, elevation, land cover, water bodies, and rivers in calculating how fast one could move over the Earth’s surface.

I downloaded the accessibility grid and the major cities layer from the website and brought it into ArcMap. I added roadways, the 30 degree grid, and country boundaries for context and projected everything to Robinson. I created and posted a lesson and the base data to ArcLessons. Cell values show minutes of travel time to major cities. Conversion from minutes to days provides an excellent math connection.

Northern Canada, northern Russia, and Greenland stand out as expected as being far from major cities, but the contrast between Amazonian vs. coastal Brazil, Tibet vs. India, and Outback vs. east-coast Australia is striking.

At least a half day in central Colorado is required to reach Denver or other major city from a mountainside, but the same is true of reaching Omaha or Wichita after spending time in the Nebraska Sand Hills or other Great Plains locations.

I encourage you to investigate this unusual, well-researched, fascinating data set.

- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

Peter Eredics, ESRI Forestry Program Manager, just alerted us to a very interesting and useful ArcGIS Server application by the World Resources Institute. The application is part of WRI’s Southern Forests for the Future Program. The new Web mapping app provides a new way to learn about and protect forests of the southern United States.

For a quick tutorial, watch the YouTube map viewer demonstration video they have created. It highlights some very compelling components tied to the data services the app presents (e.g., the 1940-2030 suburbanization layer and its time line slider), map tools (including mark up and sharing), and valuable text and multimedia items linked to various Forest Features, Drivers of Change, and Solutions.

Not interested in watching the video, simply charge ahead and discover what the site has to offer and the begin imagining what you can be teaching with it via your Web browser.

For more about the site, see WRI’s press release and Matt Artz’s blog post about it.

- George Dailey, ESRI Education Program Manager

from the ArcGIS Explorer blog:

A new version of ArcGIS Explorer (build 1200) is now available for download at:

http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/explorer

http://resources.esri.com/arcgisexplorer

If you've not installed ArcGIS Explorer before, you can run the system check utility or review the platform requirements before you install. If you are already using ArcGIS Explorer on the same machine as ArcGIS Desktop, please note that the uninstall may take a few minutes...

Read more from the ArcGIS Explorer blog.

Over the last week, I have had the delightful opportunity to attend two events that speak to my interest in education reform: EAST (formerly formally "Environmental And Spatial Technologies") and ASCD (formerly formally "Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development").

At the annual conference for EAST, about 175 schools (all but a handful from Arkansas) showed up with 5-10 kids and a couple of adults. In the EAST model, students must conceive, plan, conduct, and report on activities that are tech-based and service-oriented. Kids handle most of their own instruction, and engage some pretty sophisticated technologies, including professional geographic information systems (GIS). The teachers are "facilitators," in name and deed; they ask questions and help kids think strategically, but let the students do the "heavy lifting". Because the tasks are their own, kids are hugely invested, and learn a vast amount of contextual knowledge, technology skills, and "soft skills" -- research, collaboration, creative design, problem-solving, and communication.

This shows nicely in GIS. For the conference, ESRI hosts a competition, to which students submit projects. From this year's submissions, six finalists were chosen; they presented to me for five minutes, and I asked them questions for five minutes. Students in grades 7-12 showed projects on topics like local bus routes, public safety, and community participation in school bond voting. Students had to grapple with generating data, integrating data from disparate sources, presenting complex information for the public to grasp quickly, and learning challenging tools. It was truly thrilling to see.

From EAST I went to ASCD, in order to present about the role of geography in 21st century education. At the conference, speaker after speaker, in sessions large and small, talked about what education should be, and how to get there. The commonalities were these: For students to engage most powerfully, teachers must let these digital natives co-create their learning experiences. Technology is a key part of their world, and educators should use that to advantage. Basic goals and bounds can be provided, but educators must engage the students where they are today. Students need to wrestle with finding information and making decisions about what is useful or not for a particular purpose. Students should integrate resources, in creative ways, working independently and collaboratively. They need to be challenged with important relevant choices, through which they can build contextual understanding, even melding disciplines. Students crave coaching, not lecturing. And they require positive role models of lifelong learners who will explore, attempt, stumble, and attempt again in a new direction.

It did my heart good to hear so many educators describing what are the processes of using GIS. We know that, in the hands of effective educators, GIS is a tool with exceptional capacity for improving education, for students of all ages. And it was thrilling to know that so many kids in at least one project are on a powerful educational course, building a better today, not waiting for tomorrow.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Co-Manager, ESRI Schools Program

A new lesson in the ArcLessons library allows for investigations of the devastating earthquakes in January 2010 in Haiti using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as the analytical tool. Through this lesson and data set, you can examine fault lines, population, ocean floors, plate boundaries, volcanoes, and other phenomena to gain an understanding of the physical and cultural geography of the Caribbean Sea region.

Were the January 2010 earthquakes in Haiti different from historical earthquakes in the region, and if so, how and why? What features result from tectonic forces in the Caribbean region and what populations are most vulnerable?

This lesson uses ArcGIS desktop software with activities that use 3-D tools ArcGlobe and ArcGIS Explorer. This lesson is intended for secondary and university students with an intermediate level of GIS skills and some familiarity with the spatial perspective. This lesson will give you the opportunity to practice your GIS skills, and enhance your spatial thinking skills in analyzing patterns, relationships, and trends. The lesson assumes an intermediate level of understanding of how to symbolize, conduct queries, and how to run geoprocessing functions within ArcMap including the computation of weighted mean centers.

Through this investigation, you will learn that all historical earthquakes according to the data set on the island of Hispaniola and vicinity occurred at a lower magnitude, and they all occurred on the northeast side of the island in the Dominican Republic and offshore. By contrast, the January 2010 earthquake and aftershocks all occurred on the western (Haiti) side of the island, near Port-au-Prince.

Consider the difference in the death toll between the Haiti earthquake and the Chile earthquake that occurred 6 weeks later on 27 February 2010. The Chile earthquake was much greater in magnitude than the Haiti earthquake (8.8 versus 7.0) but the death toll was less. Compare the history of earthquakes, economics, and building codes between Haiti and Chile. Why was the Haiti earthquake so much more devastating?

GIS and the spatial perspective can help us to understand current events—even those as horrific as these.

--Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

Many of you are familiar with Action Research. One of the ideas behind Action Research is that we are all researchers in our classrooms and we are all attempting to improve the practice of teaching as we engage in the practice. Many of you may also be familiar with a number of resources that are available suggesting that student participation and collaborative learning increase the amount of learning that occurs in the classroom. However, lecturing continues to predominate as the method for teaching in Higher Education. It ensures quick delivery and that specified content can be covered. When we were students we learned that way. If it was good enough for us....

Another method of teaching, when we are not lecturing, is actually closer to training. In Higher Education lab sessions we frequently give students a set of instructions to follow that are like training manuals. That’s how we learned. If it was good enough for us…

I’d like to suggest that we perform some Action Research in our classes. I’ve just posted a video in the Instructional Resources, videos, entitled “Teaching GIS in Higher Education”, subtitled “Education, not training”. What if we change our methods? Will our students improve in their ability to use GIS? Will we have more time to develop lessons that aren’t merely training exercises?

Have a look at the video, let me know what you think.

-Toni Fisher, ESRI Higher Education Manager

Geodatabases encourage creativity and higher levels of cognition. Geodatabases require design which, by nature, is creative. Creativity stimulates the brain. Geodatabases are models. Working with the elements that need to be modeled to create a digital world requires that the creator understands how the real world elements relate to each other. In order to create a good model, you have to have an in-depth understanding of the elements that are part of the model. Modeling requires higher levels of thinking, including analytic thinking.

Note, Shapefiles are not part of geodatabases. You can read about the limitations of shapefiles in these help files for desktop which discuss the history of the shapefile and the benefits of the geodatabase. Some of the limitations of shapefiles may be surprising to you.

Geoprocessing considerations for shapefile output

Topology basics

Centralizing data in geodatabases promotes sharing. Sharing data allows us to work collaboratively in our classes, on our campuses and with other institutions. Sharing good quality data, as is created within a geodatabase, makes a difference to all of us both from the perspective of good quality, available data and from the perspective of promoting the inclination to share.

Teaching students with and about geodatabases is a winning proposition. If you have more interest in geodatabases, please watch the video I created for the Instructional Materials, GIS video tutorials section of the ESRI GIS Education Community webpage.

-Toni Fisher, Higher Education Manager, ESRI

GLOBE at Night is an annual 2-week campaign in March. People all over the world record the brightness of their night sky by matching its appearance toward the constellation Orion with star maps of progressively fainter stars. They submit their measurements on-line and a few weeks later, organizers release a map of light-pollution levels worldwide. Over the last four GLOBE at Night campaigns, volunteers from over 100 nations have contributed 35,000 measurements.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the 2009 GLOBE at Night campaign during 16-28 March! Through GLOBE at Night, students — alongside teachers, parents and community members — amassed a data set from which they can begin to explore the concept of light pollution and to research the patterns of light pollution across the globe.

A record number of over 15,000 measurements were received in the 2009 campaign! See this data on the Map page.

Join us and contribute your observation.

A new lesson has been posted to ArcLessons, exploring recent worldwide earthquakes with the free, cross-platform ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education (AEJEE).

Map and analyze the last 30 days of earthquakes around the world, examining depth, magnitude, relationship to plate boundaries, and comparing recent earthquakes to historical earthquakes.

Explore, download, or rate and review this lesson.

- Tom Baker, ESRI Education Manager

Once again, we have been delivered a stunning lesson in earth science. A tremendous earthquake (magnitude 8.5 or so) rocked Chile this weekend, spawning tsunami warnings across the Pacific. The questions I, as a geography teacher, would have asked my students are my standard three: "What's where? Why is it there? So what?" I wondered especially about this quake versus the one which caused such suffering in Haiti a month ago. To look at these, I decided to make some simple but powerful maps in ArcView. It turned into a nice example of how "GIS is a power tool for STEM" (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

From the USGS Global Earthquake Search website I downloaded the earthquakes of January and February, 2010, with magnitude greater than 2.0, and saved it as a text file. (This took one minute.) In Notepad, I cleaned up the header and footer, visually scanned the data and fixed two bad records, then used "global replace" three times to convert the data into my preferred format for GIS display [download file]. (Two more minutes.) In ArcView, I added just the quakes, then copied and pasted the layer to generate two versions. I set the lower layer as graduated circles based on magnitude and coded the upper layer by color based on depth. (Three more minutes.) Right away, interesting patterns showed up.

Wow, look at the subduction zones! Next, I added some background from ArcGIS Online and zoomed in to the relevant area of South America and the Caribbean. (One minute.)

The subduction zone of western South America popped out like a sore thumb, so I decided to see it in 3D. I exported the data to a shapefile, and exported the magnitude symbology as a layer file. (One minute.) I opened ArcScene, added the shapefile, applied the layer symbology, set the base height as "[Depth] * -.1" (using negative to make the points drop below the surface), added a country layer, and set the countries as hollow with a black border. (Two minutes.)

In 10 minutes, I had a banquet of STEM lessons before me. I spent the next 10 minutes just looking at the pattern from all angles. Then I created a short animation and exported it to a 50mb .avi video file, which I converted (via a third party video tool) into a  video posted on YouTube.

One challenge with GIS is the wealth of subjects that can be addressed and the infinite directions in which each can be pursued. Education means learning from experiences around you. The Chilean quake has been described as 500 times more powerful than that which devastated Haiti. What can be learned from this about zones of susceptibility, building codes, and preparedness? GIS is a tool through which educators can generate powerful STEM lessons that can help learners of all ages build a better tomorrow.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, Co-Manager, ESRI Schools Program

I just wrote a new lesson to bring field data along with their latitude and longitude coordinates from a GPS into a GIS environment by creating a spreadsheet. The lesson also shows how video, photographs, websites, text, and other objects can be hyperlinked to each desired point.

Yet as I was writing the lesson, and teaching these skills in a recent professional development workshop for teachers, I could not help but notice that the lesson illustrates far more than the technical skills of bringing data from one format to another. First, it illustrates the worlds that can literally open up when spreadsheet data is mapped. Patterns may or may not emerge. The lack of spatial patterns says just as much about whatever is being mapped than a clear spatial pattern. Yet either way, it becomes clear that a map communicates more and richer content than a spreadsheet.

Second, this lesson illustrates one method of bringing field data and GPS-gathered coordinates into a GIS. Other methods exist, including manually creating other types of spreadsheet files (such as DBF) or text files (such as CSV or TXT), as well as automatically uploading the data and coordinates via a cable.

This brings up the third point that the lesson illustrates. Sometimes the data files will include something that prevents them from being “map-able.” This is analogous to the occasional problem I still have writing CD-ROMs—sometimes, the process just doesn’t work, and I have to try again. There are common items to check when your data is not “map-able.” Spaces in the field names, spaces in the file name, the latitude-longitude coordinates truncated, a letter “O” instead of a zero, a comma instead of a period, extra rows in the table, and the data not starting in column 1 are a few things to check. It can take a few extra minutes, but these moments actually can serve a purpose—they teach students to be problem solvers, which is exactly what they will have to do to be successful in the workplace.

--Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager

I love surprising my students with facts and trivia that will make curricular elements stick with them. Previously, I discussed using place as proof and analyzing water resources. What about breaking the stereotype that if you're good at English then you can't do math! The students I tutor in Algebra are always surprised that I can indeed "do math."

A great way to incorporate a little math is a journey book or story. A great example is Journey to Jo'burg by Beverly Naidoo. A 13-year old boy and his sister must make a journey 300 kilometers from their small village to Johannesburg, South Africa to get medical help. How far is that...really? For you sharp GIS folks, it's a quick little buffer activity in ArcGIS or AEJEE. You could use ArcGIS Explorer and measure that distance; however, if you only have the internet available to your classroom, our trusty tool Sketch-A-Map can give us some assistance here. As the teacher you will have to do some homework here to discover real distance. In the case of our story, Pietersburg, South Africa is approximately 300 kilometers from Johannesburg.

With the street map in view, students can draw a line on the map of that distance and more lines to discover where the children's small village is. For some perspective, then we could zoom over to the USA and draw a similar line from Washington, D.C. to Newark, NJ. It's about the same distance. Most students would realize quickly, "Hey! That's pretty far!" Most of my students wouldn't have considered such a journey!

Now that we can see that journey on the map, let's appreciate what Tiro and Naledi in the story did to get help. Time to do a little math!

1 mile = 1.609344 kilometers. How many miles is 300 kilometers? What city is that distance from your town?

A person could walk about 2.5 miles per hour. If you made the journey, how long would it take you to get there?

If you're just a little creative, you can continue to cover your required content and give students important connections to their curriculum! As an added bonus, the math teacher will be happy too!

- Barbaree A. Duke, Language Arts Educator