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 [...]

Finland’s education success

When it comes to international results, Finland’s schools score consistently at the top. However, pupils study the fewest number of class hours in the developed world. The BBC travels to Helsinki to find out the secret of the Finns’ education success.

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 [...]

Learning to Change – Changing to Learn

This video motivates the need for a re-evaluation of the classroom for an ever changing learner. We have a responsibility to really look at how we might make learning more inspiring, more related to what learners already know and more related to what they are interested in.

Win a Grade 12 Maths course worth R5,400!

Great news at the start of the third school term! GetSmarter, a high-touch online education company, and Teacher’s Monthly are giving away a place in the upcoming Cambridge University Press Grade 12 Mathematics course worth R5,400. As a Teacher’s Monthly reader, you can nominate ANY Grade 12 learner who you think deserves to go on this course for FREE.

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 [...]

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