Information Aesthetics mentions an audio-visual work called Bella Gaia, directed by Kenji Williams that animates satellite imagery and spatial data. The production makes use of NASA’s World Wind virtual globe and might be useful as an introduction to a lesson on remote sensing.
Archive for the 'GIS' Category
I’ve created a Google Docs presentation to generate some ideas for using GIS in the classroom. Please get in touch if you’d like to help out. You’ll need to create a Google account first. I’m looking for ideas for both primary and secondary classrooms. Inspiration of course comes from Tom Barrett’s ‘Interesting Ways to..’ series of presentations, while more generic ideas are being collated in Tony Cassidy’s 101 creatively simple ways to teach Geography.
My Year 8 class have been working on the Google Earth hazard planning activity: San Francisco: visualizing a safer city. I’ve added some of my own feedback to their placemarks, as the activity isn’t quite finished yet.
Basically, the idea of the activity is to locate a safe site for a new hospital, leveraging the full potential of Google Earth Layers, Street View and some custom overlays of various types of data.
Download the student’s work as a Google Earth file here. Then add the necessary Google Earth overlays to check the validity of their claims!
There’s a poll to choose the best piece of work. Feel free to vote or leave a comment.
Note to class – the comments are moderated, and one of you isn’t allowed to win anyway 
Loading ...I need to teach the Aral Sea to a GCSE class tomorrow. Aware of schemes to save part of the Aral, I used the Time Slider feature in Google Earth 5 to check the imagery for the area. Amazingly, the  whole ecological catastrophe is covered by the imagery database. I made a brief  video to illustrate:
Shrinking Aral Sea from Noel Jenkins on Vimeo.
Google Earth isn’t just an essential resource for teaching the Aral Sea issue, it’s a powerful political tool and students should be aware of this. Governments are becoming increasingly accountable in the face of unequivocal evidence from the Google database which has revealed slum clearance in Zimbabwe and genocide in Darfur. The Aral Sea crisis was kept secret for many years, and while Google Earth reveals the astonishing rate of evaporation, it is interesting to note that the current image (if it is indeed the most recent) does appear to show a slight reversal of fortunes.
Finally, could it be that Street View is coming to the UK in March?  I’ve heard a rumour
I met with traveling Australian teacher and GIS evangelist Malcolm McInnery at the Royal Geographical Society this week. We were joined by Judy Mansell from the RGS and David Rayner, the newly appointed National Subject Lead for Geography who is responsible for introducing the revised KS3 curriculum in schools.
Malcolm is traveling to Hong Kong, Canada the USA and the UK to research spatial technology and spatial literacy in schools, with a view to continuing the work that he has been doing to raise awareness of GIS in Australia. His thought provoking questions left us reflecting on why the implementation of GIS in UK schools is still patchy, often depending on an enthusiastic individual teacher, rather than being firmly embedded in the curriculum. Given the rapid expansion of GIS in industry and public services, and the associated demand for spatial literacy skills in students, as well the entitlement arising from the new National Curriculum, it is certainly time to reflect on the role that spatial technologies should have in the classroom.
Is there a problem with spatial literacy?
source
Malcolm describes our discussion on his Spatial Worlds blog. One of the main points arising for me was the reaffirmation of my conviction that the best use of GIS stems from students being involved in the collection of data rather than just working with existing data sets. Projects can and should be aimed at real world decision making. Council departments should become used to dealing with enquiries following the latest revealing discoveries from local students. My local crime enquiry is somewhat dated now but is the kind of thing I’m suggesting. Equally there is plenty of scope for students to share data and ideas across national and international boundaries. As schools take on a more international dimension (see previous post) the sharing of geographical information could become more prevalent. My Visualizing a Safer City lesson, where students locate a new hospital in San Francisco was commented on by local residents. This gave the work much more credibility. It would be great for a class in the USA to do the same activity for a new building in my home town.
I look forward to following the rest of Malcolm’s travels via his blog.
New developments to the leading online mapping applications are widely reported today. Geography teachers should be aware that some of these features are going to be really useful for writing up fieldwork notes and coursework projects, especially as some form of GIS experience is required by the new Key Stage Three proposals.
Mapperz highlights the new version of Live Local, which is an essential resource for teachers who work in an area deprived of acceptable Google Earth imagery. One of the best new features is the opportunity to subscribe to collections via RSS. At some stage I’m going to repost my own Live Local Collections with the feed link in case anyone would be interested.
Ogle Earth has compared the relative merits of the drawing tools in Live Local and Google Maps in a useful article. I’ve pleased that a number of my students seem to have enhanced their GCSE projects this year with quite good annotation of map and photo data.
Finally, Google Earth Blog is one of several blogs to comment on the new My Maps feature of Google Maps. What’s really exciting is that you can create a My Map and then see the results in Google Earth.
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