GIS Ed Weekly: Mapping Drone Education Programs and Drone Rescues

Resources for Teaching and Learning

Chartable (DataWrapper Blog): Lisa Charlotte Rost offers a three part series on colorblindness. There are valuable insights for anyone creating dataviz including insights from some colorblind cartographers.

• 1 How your colorblind and colorweak readers see your colors
• 2 What to consider when visualizing data for colorblind readrs
• 3 What’s it like to be colorblind

GeoTech Center: Geospatial Technology Educator Certification - The first cohort has completed the certification. I confess, I lost touch with that effort, which was noted in a GeoTech Center newsletter last year (pdf). Thankfully, educator Jason Smolinsky, shared his certification on LinkedIn this week.

GIS Education Weekly: Couple Starts Geography Field Trip Endowment

Jobs

DroneII: The Drone Job Market - Drone Industry Insights - An interesting overview from a drone focussed recruiter. What do you make of the map on the provided infographic?

Programs and Courses

Twitter: Don Boyes from the University of Toronto reports on his GIS specialization at Coursera: "Over 2,000 people have enrolled in the first #GIS course and over 1,000 in the specialization!" There seems to be for a variety of GIS courses and credentials across different delivery and software platforms.

GIS Weekly: Are Drones, and Drone Courses, Leading to Jobs?

Geo for All News

Geo for All opened a call for tutors for the UN Open GIS Initiative. The group seeks people with "expertise in QGIS" and interest in volunteering for "UN Open GIS Initiative online self paced courses."

The slides from The State of Geo For All presented by Helena Mitasova, Vaclav Petras, Anna Petrasova from North Carolina State University (NCSU) GeoForAll Lab at FOSS4G 2017 Boston are available.

GIS Education Weekly: Geo for All and the United Nations, Parrot's Drone Education Program

United Nations Explores GeoAcademy Curriculum with Help from Geo for All

Two weeks ago news crossed my desk describing uptake of the GeoAcademy curriculum for training UN staff in its move from proprietary to open source GIS. Maria Antonia Brovelli, Vice Rector for Como Campus and GIS Professor, Politecnico di Milano who leads a UN capacity building working group, which has support from Geo for All volunteers, made a statement.

...a voluntary team of people of our GEO4ALL network are working in a capacity building project related to a migration of UN staff from proprietary to OS software. The team revised the tutorial and will start the first experiment with the QGIS GeoAcademy tutorial.

I contacted Brovelli to get some context. She explained that the "UN OpenGIS Initiative aims at developing an enterprise GIS system using free and open source geospatial solutions in support of UN Peace Operations." The Geo for All volunteers are working to provide "suitable training packages for UN staff on open source geospatial technologies." The news, then, is about the first step in this capacity building:

As the first step, it was decided to conduct training program as a virtual class for UN Staff, which is an on-line course as self-training with the help of G4A tutors, using some free and open source selected tutorials. The virtual class training courses will cover various subjects such as QGIS, PostGIS, GeoNode, GeoServer and OpenLayers. UN Staff will directly access training material through the free and open source ‘Beep Platform’ of Politecnico di Milano and could also be communicated with Tutors. The first course for the virtual class is chosen for QGIS GeoAcademy. The virtual class will be started in the second half of September 2016.

GIS Education Weekly: NCGE Challenge Winners, Service Learning, Drones

What the Planet Really Looks Like

The Daily Mail wrote quite a bit about The True Size, a Web app that compares the size of countries and highlight the challenges of the Mercator projection.

Case Study: Is [GIS] Service Learning Worth the Effort?

Short answer: Yes.  Georgiana Bostean from Chapman University explains how she does it and why it's worth it.

Bay Area Geo-Educators Summit

BayGeo is convening a Bay Area Geo-Educators Summit on Friday, October 2 at Stanford University. We hope to see many fellow educators from K-12, colleges, and universities from the Bay Area. 

The primary objective of the Summit is to give educators teaching and using geospatial technology a semi-structured yet informal forum to meet and share ideas.

GIS Education Weekly: Story Maps and Data Maps, ConnectED Funds for NH, Esri for Science

US National Center for Educational Statistics Story and Data Maps

The new MapED maps from US National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) replace older Esri Flash-based maps. The new site offers two kinds of maps.

Story Maps

High School Graduation Rate Map:
Blue: above avg, white: about avg, gray: below avg.

Our Story Maps are developed using CENSUS and NCES datasets and publications. The goal is to present interesting data concepts in an interactive and easily digestable format for everyone.

Data Maps

Data Maps are designed for all experience levels. Simply select a Topic or Program to begin. Start by browsing data indicators that interest you. Then customize map settings to create a more specialized map.