GIS in Education

I saw this post in the ESRI GIS Community Blog. Written by Joseph Kerski, it is an interesting read. The author gives many reasons why spatial analysis is important in education including social, ethical, creative, logical, practical and essential ones. The article concludes by saying that “using GIS in education is essential in order to [...]

Free web-based Science, Biology & Geography simulations

The end is (almost) in sight for the chalkboard with hand-drawn diagrams of the way the world around us works. Thanks to Flash, a fairly simple to use Adobe product, quality interactive simulations are becoming more readily available on the internet that are well suited to classroom teaching. Pearson Education and ForgeFX have teamed up [...]

Educational value of GIS

In this article I ask “What can Geographical Information Systems do for our learners from an educational perspective?“. What can GIS do for our learners? What is the educational value of GIS? It can encourage exploration Encourages discovery learning and looking for new possibilities Assists in recognising that there is rarely a ‘right’ answer to [...]

Understanding GIS

This overview will give you a sense of what GIS is and how they are used in society. What is GIS? It stands for Geographical Information Systems. These computer-based systems are a combination of elements designed to store, retrieve, manipulate and display information about places (geographic data). GIS are known as spatial technologies: they have [...]

National Geographic Editorial about Geo-literacy

Whilst looking at resources on the web, I found this interesting and informative article on the National Geographic Education site entitled “Geo-Literacy -Preparation for Far-Reaching Decisions”. Whilst they use the term ‘geo-literacy‘, we can assume that they are talking about similar concepts as those I have defined for ‘spatial literacy’. On page 2 of the [...]

House Layout Exercise – Quick Ideas for Developing Spatial Literacy

This is a fun, self-contained exercise for working with differing levels of scale and detail in floor plans. I found this on the internet, but for the life of me cannot remember where. I converted the exercise so that all measurements are metric. Great for integrating maths, geography and spatial literacy. Just print off the [...]

Geography and GIS Series

I have been writing about Spatial Literacy for Teacher’s Monthly over the last 6 months. Those articles will still continue but I’d like to look a little deeper into one specific tool that can be used to teach spatial literacy, namely GIS. The National Research Council Report (NRC, 2000, p.19), says that the spatial literacy [...]

Jigsaws – Quick Ideas for Developing Spatial Literacy

Teach your learners to do jigsaw puzzles of varying complexities from an early age especially if learners come from homes, backgrounds or cultures that do not have access to pastimes like this. WHY? This month’s theme was connections. Jigsaws are all about connections, from placing the pieces correctly to make the picture, to connecting hand-eye [...]

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