GIS Education Weekly: The NY Times and a Teacher in Harlem Tackle Geography Education

An animation shows the spread
of covenants across the city.

Articles

The Star Tribune (MN): Massive project works to uncover racist restrictions in Minneapolis housing deeds - As many as 10,000 or more Minneapolis homeowners have property deeds with so-called "racial covenants." A team of University of Minnesota researchers is determined to find them all. Wow, that's what made such a mess in Chicago!

StateScoop: GIS industry remains at odds over Geospatial Data Act - "Some say existing language in the legislation designed to support the geospatial technologies industry would unfairly exclude many firms from bidding on federal contracts." Others suggest nothing will happen with the legislation until at least Oct 1.

GIS Education Weekly: NSF Videos, Summer MOOCs

NSF Teaching and Learning Video Showcase includes GIS

The NSF 2015 Teaching and Learning Video Showcase: Improving Science, Math, Engineering, and Computer Science Education event will be held online May 11-15, 2015. Seven NSF funded resource centers including, MSPnet, CADRE, CIRCL, CAISE, STELAR, CS10K and ARC have come together to host this cross-center online video event to showcase cutting-edge NSF work.

Students use QGIS in Elementary Classroom Video

At least two of the 112 presentations include GIS. There's voting for awards by facilitators, presenters and viewers. Voting runs until Friday and winners will be announced Monday. Here are the two GIS focused videos I found:

GIS in the Elementary Classroom: Impact on Higher-level Reasoning and Spatial Thinking
I liked this one in part because it used paired learning and QGIS (at right), though the package was not named.

Addressing STEM Demand through the GRACE Program
This effort focuses on the GRACE program in Michigan and how it taps into ConnectED. It mentions the Environmental Systems Research Institute. I noted the GRACE program here; there are more details from EMU here.

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Find a Grant to Fund STEM Initiatives, Professional Development and other Educational Imperatives

I'm always wary of databases or indexes hosted by commercial companies. I have to believe there is a motive beyond altruism. Thus, a database offered by IT warehouse CDWG (the part of CDW that serves education, government and healthcare) is suspect. While I'm sure there are some honest "service to the community" goals for the effort, I'm also sure there's some hope dollars delivered to schools, educators and students via its GetEdFunding website will end up in the company coffers.

GetEdFunding is a free, curated database of more than 750 active grants and awards (as of January 8) "that are currently available to public and private pre-K–12 schools, districts and educators, higher education institutions and the nonprofit organizations that work with them. I'd take that number with a grain of salt; many of the results I found had application dates during 2012 and many others were unsure of funding for 2013. I also found some "contests" that were not really grants including the National Geography Bee listed.

The site allows searches by geography (U.S. state or nationwide) institutional eligibility (public, private, charter, etc.), grade level (by grade group, higher ed, adult), focus (humanities, ed tech, professional development or STEM), content areas (arts, math, social science) and what are called 21st Century Skills (critical thinking, global awareness and problem solving).

I searched for U.S. grants for grade 9-12 STEM grants and got 50 results. Many are from federal government agencies like the National Science Foundation or the Department of Education while others are from professional groups like American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and AAUW. Many are from private corporations like Lowes and United Technologies Corporation.

A keyword search on "geography" resulted in two state grants, including one from a state geography alliance. Good to see!

It's worth a quick look and perhaps an application if it will mean a professional development workshop for an instructor or a new computer for the classroom.

- via EdTech Magazine