Education Blog

Visit the Esri schools team at the conference of the National Science Teachers Association in Anaheim, CA this April.  Find us in our exhibit, workshops, and collaborator talks throughout the event! 

Esri offers two basic types of AI tools: GeoAI and AI Assistants. GeoAI powers advanced spatial analysis, while AI Assistants make GIS easier to use and understand. Learn more about each type and how they could be used to support teaching and learning.

As MLK Day approaches, learning about the Civil Rights Movement is a common classroom topic. Our friends at the Virginia Geographic Alliance have created a great activity exploring the Civil Rights Movement through maps and primary sources. Your students will learn about key events and people leading up to, during, and since the movement. Teacher and student guides accompany the StoryMap.

If you’ve taken a GIS or geography course, you know the moment is coming: the semester-long GIS project.

This blog post introduces Esri Tutorials, resources that can help you choose a topic ahead of time so you can get a solid start.

Esri consistently releases new contents, updates, and resources related to their products, solutions, apps, and applications, as well as best practices, success stories, recorded webinars, and more. Although these resources are posted in various locations, they can be difficult to find.

This blog provides a comprehensive list of all the December 2025 technical highlights and resources from Esri. It is a buffet-style list, so feel free to pick and choose the topics that interest you.

One of the challenges to fostering good data stewardship practices in ArcGIS Online -- in Higher-Education organizations in particular -- is the lack of insight users have into their own Feature Storage use. As a workaround, one can provide users with a Dashboard for monitoring their use of Feature Storage:

Building such a Dashboard as an ArcGIS Online administrator, and the workflow that supports it, is described in the StoryMap: Empowered Data Stewardship: Enable users to monitor their Feature Storage use.

AI is a great tool for generating a first draft. Take a picture with Survey123 and let AI provide a first draft of survey answers, from an image description to choosing from a list of answers. See this blog to learn how to set up your survey with this behavior.

Many students are interested in trying GeoAI capabilities in ArcGIS.  Some have only a few hours to spend, others plan to use it for class projects, and some aim to use it for a longer research project.

The goal of this blog is to guide you to take your first steps into the world of GeoAI using ArcGIS, focusing specifically on deep learning.

A geopuzzle just in time for the holidays - use the map and clues to find a likely location of the fabled "Island of Misfit Toys".

This next semester, your students won’t even need to create their own maps or think critically about their work. Esri added in an ‘easy’ button, in the form of AI Assistants. With agentic workflows, you can just hit ‘go’ and send your students out onto the campus green!

AI Assistants are here across a wide-range of Esri’s tools and they can be easily worked into the classroom in some really fun and engaging ways. This blog is going to explore 2 ways that you can use the AI Assistants found in Esri’s Documentation as well as the Map Viewer.

These tools can easily be incorporated into either introductory or advanced classes/coursework. The most exciting aspect of this technology, are the ways that it can be used to ‘push’ higher level inquiry and explorations, from spatial fundamentals, up to advanced scripting and cartography.