I recently conducted an inservice workshop for secondary-level instructors here at ESRI in Broomfield, Colorado. I find that including GIS and GPS technologies in the framework of inquiry-based lessons fits quite well with the goal of modeling how to teach applied geography—investigating culture, people, landscapes, natural hazards, biodiversity, urban sprawl, and in this case, land cover and land use.
On campus here, we took some GPS readings, and noted the natural land cover, current land cover, and current land use. We wrote down the latitude, longitude, natural land cover (in this case, shortgrass prairie), current land cover (in this case, grass lawn with some native longstem grasses planted), and current land use (office park). Once back in the lab, we created a spreadsheet of this data, saved it as a CSV file, and used Tools Import File to map it in 3-D using ArcGIS Explorer. We downloaded the photographs from the camera and uploaded them to a website (alternatively, we could have uploaded them to the local computer). Next, we added the following text to the popup content window for a selected point:
< HTML>
<B> View to the Flatirons from ESRI Broomfield </B>
Shortgrass Prairie Ecoregion <BR>
<IMG height=250 src=”http://www.josephkerski.com/images/back_lawn.jpg” width=430>
Quick help guides abound on the Internet for writing simple HTML scripts like the one above. For example, the <B> tags </B> make the text bold. The size parameters in the IMG SRC (image source) tags reduce the size of the photographs on the popup windows so they won’t take up the whole screen.
We then right clicked on each data point and told the software to show the popup window. The result is below:
The activity took only 45 minutes, but could be expanded to include additional points, or linking to videos, scanned landscape sketches, URLs about the land use of this area, observations about each point written as text files, and more.
If this whets your appetite for doing more, see the ArcGIS Explorer blog: http://blogs.esri.com/Info/blogs/arcgisexplorerblog/
For popup windows, see: http://blogs.esri.com/Info/blogs/arcgisexplorerblog/archive/2008/04/07/photos-and-sounds-in-note-popups.aspx
- Joseph Kerski, ESRI Education Manager
