GeoMentors Case Study: Rocky A.: GIS Certification for High Schools; 9-12th Grade; Florida

[JoleneKeen1]

GeoMentor Case Study: Rocky A.

City/State of School, School District, or Group: Saint Johns, Florida and St. Augustine, Florida School District

Grade level of students you or your educator collaborator work/worked with: 9th - 12th grade

Subject/topic of class/group you assisted your collaborator with:

- CHS Advisory Board Chairman

- Student summer internship

- GIS Certification

- Project Green

- In class guest speaker

- GIS Day

- After school GIS Club

Approximately how many students were engaged in GIS activities through this collaboration: 200 - 250 students

How did you connect with your collaborator? One of my colleague from our regional GIS group introduced me to one of the teachers from the Career Academy who needed assistance integrating GIS as part of their school curriculum.

Describe your collaboration process. The advisory board meets every quarter. In the beginning, I collaborated with the academy teachers after the meetings and couple classroom visits. The teachers also spent time on our office site to get a better feel of our GIS operations. This was done during the summer as the teachers "externship".

Describe the tasks you assisted your collaborator with. The main goal of my collaboration was to identify a GIS certification for the high school level. This is required for the academy to achieve their national distinction as a Model Career Academy. Prior to identifying a certification for the academy, the technology infrastructure has to be set as well as their software licensing. Since the academy is geared towards steering the students to a career path, I've assisted in putting in place an internship program with the school as well as other business partners.

What available resources, if any, did you use or help your collaborator use to implement GIS in K-12 education? GeoMentor site was not available when I first got started working the Creekside HS Career Academy. I definitely used the resource I gathered from the Esri UC and other regional user group conference. Esri's GIS Day swag was nice to have to engage with the students. When ArcGIS Online became available, I assisted the Academy to integrate the AGO platform as part of the teachers curriculums.

Did you develop any new educational material or GIS activities through your collaboration? My GIS collaboration sparks the interest of enough students to form their after school GIS Club program. Students are now using ArcGIS Online to create their own storymaps to illustrate their projects. Ms. Pressel also creates some of her lesson plans using AGO.

What did you gain from the experience? What do you think your educator collaborator and/or the students gained? Our agency gained an internship program that exposes the students to many aspect of a local government agency roles in the community. My experience helps promote the use of GIS and introduce the technology to the students.

The Academy now has a way to provide the students training and experience to prepare them to take the entry level Esri GIS Certification.

If your GeoMentoring engagement activities were documented through a classroom blog, school website, group’s social media post, newspaper or other media, please provide the websites of those posts.

Andre & David's Summer Internship Storymap here  

Traffic Interruption Site created by our summer intern here

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