GIS Education Weekly: Visualizing Trump's Wall and South Africa's Unequal Spaces

Resources

The third volume of the Atlas of Design from the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) is out. It contains 32 maps, which editor Marty Elmer says are interesting at first but deep enough to maintain interest. This is a great gallery for cartography and visualization teaching and learning. The print edition is now available for pre-order. National Geographic introduces the tome and provides some example maps.

Trump's proposed wall overlain
 on the eastern United States

Need to visualize the length of Trump's planned wall? A German publication has an interactive tool that lets you move the wall on a map of the world. h/t @re_sieber.

Want to see inequality in South Africa? How about looking at it from above via Unequal Scenes. The site "portrays scenes of inequality in South Africa from the air. Discrepancies in how people live are sometimes hard to see from the ground. The beauty of being able to fly is to see things from a new perspective - to see things as they really are." h/t @re_sieber.

"GIS Gang" Leader Shares Best Practices

In September 2015 Wendy Lemke, a sixth grade teacher at Ann Arbor's St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School, launched a before school club, the GIS Gang. I shared an edited version of her blogs posts about the club's meetings last week.

This Q & A focuses on the lessons learned and offers advice that other educators working with GIS in K-12 students may find valuable. Thanks for taking the time to share Wendy!

1) If you were giving advice to other schools, would you suggest GIS be used in class or in in extra-curricular club? Why?

In my experience, GIS in education consists of two parts: data analysis and map creation. So, there is a place for GIS in both arenas.

I believe that analyzing map data is an excellent and integral part of teaching science and social studies. In addition, simple map building (pinning locations with information and images) can be used in the same way that PowerPoints are used in class. . . a creative way for students to present information. A middle school classroom is a great venue for the Explorer map analysis and map creation lessons.

Lemke's GIS Gang: Ann Arbor Middle Schoolers Tackle GIS Before School

Introduction

Wendy Lemke is a 6th grade teacher at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She’s part of the GIS Resources and Applications for Career Education Project (GRACE, GRACE Project ArcGIS Online homepage). The National Science Foundation funded effort aims to expand and disseminate technology-based education for STEM careers in K-12 and the workplace. In 2015 Lemke and other participants attended a one week summer institute and a hybrid (online and face-to-face) 30 hour professional development program focusing on ArcGIS Online.

In September 2015 Lemke launched a before school club, the GIS Gang, for interested six through eight graders. She thoughtfully blogged about the group’s ten weekly meetings. With her permission, I’ve condensed her posts into a shortened “diary” that illustrates some of the excitement and inevitable ups and downs she faced. I encourage interested readers to dive into her unedited posts on GeoNet for “the rest of the story.” Next week I'll follow up with a Q&A on what she learned and suggestions for the other educators.

Hanging with GIS Educators in Maine: Just Click all the Buttons

MEGUG's GIS / Educators Conference, held last Friday in Freeport, Maine was not large. I suspect even if it hadn't snowed Friday morning, there wouldn't have been too many other attendees. But, as I've learned, sometimes those tiny meeting are the best.

I spent the day in the education track, which had between 10 and fifteen people for most of its four presentations (pdf of agenda). I wanted to share some of the presenters' and attendees' key ideas, as well as some of the thoughts that popped into my mind during the sessions.

Organizing Processes for Educators and Students 

I now have a handout titled Many Ways to Bring Your Data into ArcGIS Online. (It and other docs are here.) It details 10 different ways to bring "internal" and "external" data into ArcGIS Online. This is how an educator thought to teach other educators about the various processes. I searched the Web a bit and could not find any other document arranged quite this way. Educators think about teaching/learning/organizing differently than others.

Reinventing the Wheel  

While we explored the different ways to bring in data, specifically downloading and publishing data from the Maine Office of GIS during the above workshop, one attendee spoke up. He asked in essence, why the state does not offer these data as feature services. He asked educators and GIS professionals to let the states (and I'll argue any other orgs) know the value of these services to educators and their students.

Professional vs. Educational Software

I was reminded as presenters and attendees got lost among menus and had error boxes pop up, that ArcGIS is not designed for education.It is designed for professionals/experts. This is a blessing and a curse for educators and students.

GIS Education Brief: Goal First, Tech Second

Learning about Learning via People I don't Know via Twitter

Jennifer Maze (‏@JenGrayScience) is middle and high school science teacher in Colorado. I don't know her, but somewhere along the way I learned she was an educator to follow on Twitter. I've not been disappointed!

If I parsed her tweets from this weekend correctly, she attended a Google for Education Global Summit. She offered a torrent of tweets, one of which I'll tackle in Thursday's newsletter/post. Today I want to consider this tweet from Sunday.

NASA World Wind is a great tool.
What goal would an educator have
for its use in or outside of class?

Pick the learning goal, then the strategy, then the tool -- NEVER start with the tool! #gafesummit

That's the process I learned from my instructional designers at Penn State. I also learned that at Penn State classes are not aimed at teaching software packages. I'm guessing those who formally study education learn these ideas even earlier in their professional development than I did.

GIS Education Weekly: ConnectED at 2, R Course, When Maps Lie

ConnectED at Year Two

The White House put out a fact sheet about its ConnectED Initiative now that it's two years old. Esri has been in the program for one year at this point (press release from 2014).

Here's how Esri was listed among the private sector contributors:

Esri: Providing $[sic] free access to ArcGIS Online Organization accounts – the same Geographic Information Systems mapping technology used by government and business – to every K-12 school in America to allow students to map and analyze data.

I'm not sure why a dollar amount was not included; it was for other companies.

Esri put out a map: the national map of ConnectED commitments from a handful of companies:

U of A Putting GIS in the Library
Staff members of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Collections and Archives division plan to create a service to improve students’ research capabilities. The division was awarded a $4,000 grant to develop GIS support for student research at Ottenheimer Library.

The grant is seed money for the library to install a GIS workstation, train librarians and staff on GIS theory and methodology, and support the development of an interdisciplinary GIS project in collaboration with faculty.

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GIS Education Weekly: Syllabi, Senate, Spotlight, Sacramento

GeoTech Center Offers GIS Syllabus Repository

The GeoTech Center has been requesting syllabi from college GIS instructors for some months. This week I found the repository populated for the first time.

Nineteen institutions contributed one or more documents. Some of the PDFs have copyright, some are under a Creative Commons license and many have no license at all. Those who want to re-use the content should follow best practices. (I offer some thoughts here.)

I found several documents that read "Syllabus Not Available at this time. This course is in development and a syllabus will be available in Spring 2016." I guess they are "place holders."

The documents are arranged by institution. I'd love to see a search by title, content, date, instructor, topic, or pre-requisite. If you are interested in older syllabi, I found some on the TeachGIS site.

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NCGE Calls for Support to Increase Competitive Grant Funding for Geography

The section of the April bill passed by a Senate committee regarding education funding states:

Section 2304: 5% of the funds will be allocated to competitive grants in History, Civics and Geography, with a focus on high poverty students/schools

NCGE reports "the organizations," which I think are GENIP: AAG, NCGE, AGS and NGS, are asking for a change. They request that 15% (rather than 5%) of funding in be allocated for section 2304. NCGE asks:

If you have a moment, please reach out directly to the [Senate] education staff members included here. It’s important to tell your story and relay your experiences as a geography educator. We also suggest referencing the AAG Resolution in Support of K-12 Geography Education as an important piece of evidence for broad cross-sector and bipartisan support for geography in the United States.

I hope those who left comments to the post on the NCGE site will also contact the appropriate staffers.

GIS Education Weekly: New Competency-based Program Coming, Esri ConnectED at 1000 Schools, GISCI and USGIF Partner

SNHU Planning GIS Curriculum

Rich Schultz has noted on LinkedIn the plan for a GIS program at competency-based Southern New Hampshire University starting next fall. Open source will be part of it. Schultz left Elmhurst, a private liberal arts college outside Chicago to join the online program at SNHU last year.

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Amazon Puts Landsat Data on AWS; GIS Firms Use it

The news from Amazon:

You can now access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes through our newest Public Data Set: Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket in the Amazon S3 US West (Oregon) region.

Probably more interesting to educators is what Esri, Mapbox, Planet Labs and others have done with the datasets. You'll find what they've built at the bottom of this post.

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GPS Day

GPS Day was March 25 per a press release.

GPS Day is an extension of National Surveyors Week, an initiative focused on key educational achievements and land survey awareness. National Surveyors Week is hosted by the National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) and state surveying societies across the country. Download your National Surveyors Week Resource Kit.

While the date has passed, it's a good idea for GIS classes to consider surveying and vice versa on any available date.

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