Education Blog - Page 2

As part of our continued efforts to support students and educators amidst COVID-19 university closures, we will offer free Student licensing until August 31^st, 2020 – via Learn ArcGIS. 

The following Press Release was published, feel free to share widely - Esri Offers Students Free Access to Software for Continued Education through Coronavirus Closures.

In essence, we’re extending the Learn ArcGIS membership from the standard 60 days to August 31^st, and anyone who signs up will have that extended access. The membership includes access to ArcGIS Online and over 20 apps including ArcGIS Pro, along with a library of lessons that are available in seven languages. New lessons on public health have just been added. To sign up for a membership in Learn ArcGIS, visit learn.arcgis.com/en/become-a-member/.

This offer is retroactive for Learn ArcGIS users who registered since March 1. Any new signups may not see an immediate message communicating August 31 as an end date, but that is the effective end date. Messaging will be communicated later. 

Below is a lists of FAQ we have seen from Educators, please feel free to ask additional questions. For additional questions please check our Student Access FAQs.

Q: What is Learn ArcGIS?

A:  Learn ArcGIS is a free resource for learning to use ArcGIS in the context of real-world problems.  It provides hands-on lessons for many products, such as ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, Story Maps, Survey123, and more – over twenty in all.   

Lessons can be filtered by capability (e.g., mapping, spatial analysis, real-time visualization); product; industry; resource type; or geographic region.  Learn Paths are curated collections of resources on a given topic, such as spatial analysis or health, providing easy access to a series of activities.  

Q: My institution already provides ArcGIS, how is this different?   

A: If your institution already has ArcGIS deployed successfully, we recommend that students utilize the institution-provided licensing that is already in place. Therefore, this offer may not be applicable.  However, there are still students worldwide, who do not have access. Hence, we wanted to provide access for them.    

Q: Does this offer create another ArcGIS Online account? Are they related? 

A: This offer creates an account in the ArcGIS Online organization managed by Learn ArcGIS. This account is separate, and not related to any ArcGIS Online account provided by the university. To minimize confusion, if your institution already provides student licenses via their institution agreement (i.e. site license) AND if students are leveraging this free student license offer, please ensure that they are aware that the two accounts are separate.  

Q: How do I copy content from my Learn membership to my university account?  

A: Currently there are three ways to copy content from one organization to another - 1) ArcGIS Online Assistant, 2) GeoJOBE Admin tools, 3) ArcGIS API for Python.   
  

Q: Where do I get the installation files/executables to install ArcGIS Pro?  

A: Instructions will be sent via email when students register.  Students will receive one email message to activate their account, then a second message with instructions to download ArcGIS Pro.  Once you've received your account information, log into the Learn ArcGIS Organization and go to 

Q: Does my Learn membership include ArcMap?  

A: ArcGIS Desktop (ArcMap) is not included.  ArcGIS Pro is the desktop application included in the Learn membership.

Q: What support is offered (e.g., download and installation, general software use), and how do I get help? 

A: Community support is available in the Learn ArcGIS GeoNet community .  You can ask questions and search for information in the Content feed.

Q: I’m younger than 18 years; can I use this offer? 

A: No, this offer is available only for students 18 years or older, based on Esri’s Privacy Policies.  If you’re a student under age 18, a parent or guardian can create an account on your behalf. 

For additional questions please check our Student Access FAQs.

Explore the map of state mandated US school closings from COVID-19 or add the feature service to your own maps. Data from March 18, 2020.

Data:

https://edresources.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=5e3e07494d8347b29e6751e0c25dcc7a&view=table#ov...

Map:

https://edresources.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=febc9737c6d4473cbff8ef06be0b9d06

The ArcGIS platform with its data feeds, online tools, and wide array of maps makes it easy and powerful to teach and learn about the spatial and temporal aspects of the grim situation surrounding the Coronavirus (COVID-19). 

See the video I created that walks you through these tools.  One fast way to engage with these tools is to study the changes over space and time using the popular dashboard set up by Johns Hopkins University.  Make sure you also examine the USA county infographics on the same site, to teach about scale (in this case, the county-level scale) and also how to interpret an infographic.  These infographics were created with Business Analyst Web.  The situation is changing rapidly, and you can use this video to visualize the changes in the early months (between January and March 2020).  

Another visualization is the COVIDPulse web mapping application, here.  The power of this map is that it is simple to understand but shows trends over time and space, at multiple scales. 

COVIDPulse web mapping application. 

Another map presented in story map tabbed format is this one showing daily US County trends.  Another very informative map is the which way are things going map, below and here.

Which way are things going?  County level map.

Another way to teach, learn, and understand the situation is to have students create their own maps.  In doing so, they learn how to work with different data sets, and gain GIS skills in map creation, symbolization, classification, saving,a and sharing.  They also gain critical thinking, problem solving, and communications skills.  A logical starting point is with ArcGIS Online (www.arcgis.com).  Start a new Map > Modify Map > Add Data > Search for layers in ArcGIS Online > find the Coronavirus COVID-19 cases by CSSE GIS and Data at JHU, and add it to the map.  The data will look like this, in the following example, below.

Coronavirus data in ArcGIS Online.

Since this map is now in ArcGIS Online, you can perform many tasks on it:  You can open and examine the table, sort on specific attributes such as "cases", filter the data for specific criteria, change the base map, and add data to the map such as ecoregions, population density, airports, and more.  You can do all of this without even signing in to ArcGIS Online, and thus it is easily accessible to anyone.  But saving gives you additional power.  Once you sign into your ArcGIS Online organization, and save the map, you can now run spatial analysis tools on the data, such as Summarize Within, Overlay, and Enrich.  These tools give you additional insights as to patterns, relationships, and significant difference.  Note that you need to be creator/publisher in your ArcGIS Online organization to run the analysis tools. 

Also, now that you are signed in, you can share the map with others--collaborators, your entire organization's members, or even the whole world.  You can also create a multimedia story map from it.   This storymap updated daily from the Esri storymaps team, for example, shown in part below, is a powerful teaching tool and could serve as an idea for your own storymap that you or your students could create.

Sections of a Coronavirus Storymap.

You can also bring the layer into a 3D scene, as I did here and as shown below.

3D Scene from the JHU Coronavirus layer.

You can also make a "compare" web mapping application where you, side-by-side, lay out a 2D and a 3D map of the same data.

You can also create your own dashboard from the map, as I did shown here, containing a map, gauges, and graphs, shown below.   To learn how to create a dashboard, see my lesson guiding you through surveys, maps, and dashboards. 

Dashboard created from ArcGIS Online map.  

You can also bring the data into ArcGIS Pro for even further analysis.  ArcGIS Pro contains over 1,000 tools for analysis.

New mapping applications are appearing daily, such as this dashboard connected to news articles  and shown below.

Coronavirus dashboard with news feed. 

Another way of understanding the Coronavirus, and to develop skills in Business Analyst Web, is to create a state-based infographic showing cases, as explained here. 

To dig deeper, use the resources in the learning plan Getting Started with ArcGIS Technology for Mapping COVID-19:  Fundamentals.  

Lastly, the Esri landing Hub site provides additional COVID-19 apps, data, and resources, and is on:  https://go.esri.com/coronavirus.

Sometimes, the simplest things in GIS are incredibly wonderful.  Such is the case with the ability of creating a feature layer from a group of geotagged photographs.  In plain language, this allows you to point to a folder of photographs for which you have a location attached to them (because you have taken them from a phone with location services turned on, for example), and map the entire set of photos as a set of points in ArcGIS Online.  As my colleague explained in his blog here, this capability has existed since 2019, but I wanted to make sure that you, the education community, know how to teach and conduct research with these tools.  My video explaining these tools is here. 

To do this, first zip your photos into a zip file.  Then, go to ArcGIS Online > Add Item > Add items from my computer > Photos with Locations.  Supply a title and some tags.  The result is stored as a feature layer, explained here, which is a powerful content item that can be brought in to ArcGIS Pro for further analysis.  At the current time, the photos need to be geotagged JPG photos with standard EXIF GPS metadata.  What if your photos are not geotagged?  I have used GeoImgr in the past with success, and other tools exist as well both online and as apps for your phone (but use caution especially with online software tools to do this, making sure you read the reviews and that there is no malware). 

When done, your photos will be hyperlinked to each point as shown in this example below.  

But let's say you want the photos to appear as thumbnails inside the popups.  For example, see this map and screen shot below containing photos I took on a hiking trip to beautiful southwest Colorado.  I did this by (1) configuring the popup, and (2) in the attribute expressions zone of the popup configure tools, I added a few lines of Arcade expressions as explained by my colleague Jennifer Bell, here.  In essence, each photo is stored as an "attachment" in ArcGIS Online, and each is stored with an ID number.  The Arcade expressions (1) Calculate the attachment ID for each feature, and (2) Configure the pop-up to display the attachment URL as an image.

My expression has the following appearance:

var Part1 =
"https://services.arcgis.com/IZtlGBUe4KTzLOl4/arcgis/rest/services/lake_city_for_photo_viewer/FeatureServer/0/"
var ObjectID = $feature.OBJECTID
var Part2 = "/attachments/"
var AttachID = $feature.AttachID
When($feature.CountAttachments > 0, Part1 + ObjectID + Part2 + AttachID, null)

In the map, I have, fittingly, used the USGS topographic maps as a base map, via Modify Map > Add Data > search for and add "USA Topo Maps".  I have clicked on one photo in the screenshot below, but using the map link above, you can interact with it and examine more photos on this amazing landscape.  In each popup, you can click on the link for the full sized image.   One of the full sized images is here, for example, and also shown at the end of this essay. 

There are several advantages to the "photos with locations" method in education and beyond.  First, the photos are stored in ArcGIS Online, so there is no need to use Flickr or other photo sharing tools, which, as I have documented here on GeoNet, frequently present challenges.  Second, the resulting layer is a feature layer, rather than simply points being stored in a map, and so has some powerful functionality--you can bring the layer into ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Insights, or Community Analyst, to perform additional analysis on it. In my case, bringing the layer into a 3D scene is especially appropriate, as shown below.  You can also use it in a storymap.  Third, the popups are automatically configured.  You can of course add additional information to the popup.  Fourth, maybe the best part of all, the whole process takes mere minutes from the zipping to the mapping.  

3D Scene of the photos with locations layer.

Consider using these techniques to map something of interest to you and your students.  It could be places where you test water quality, litter, invasive species, types of clouds, street signs, types of cafes, recycling bins, places of concern in your community (such as broken sidewalks or dangerous intersections), or something else entirely. 

And there is more to come!  In the new map viewer, popups have been improved in many ways, as explained here. See the improvements already in the beta release, below, you will notice a decent sized thumbnail for every one of my points without any custom code or manual insertion of URLs.  The default popup mode is "list", which shows a tiny thumbnail, but if you use attachments > and uncheck "show as list", the images convert to a "gallery" mode, shown here. 

Images in popups as shown in the new ArcGIS Online Map Viewer. 

Ah! Now go out there, do some fieldwork, take your own photos, and start mapping and analyzing them!

I get asked occasionally about some of the videos I have made and/or show with the aim to get students excited about what geography is and to understand what geography is about.  Each includes the important role that GIS has in helping us understand our world.  The following list of videos are only a few minutes each, and have been created in an engaging manner to hold students' interest:

1. Geography Matters - https://youtu.be/8L6LWMAOQIA  This starts with elevator speech, and even includes a roller coaster video I filmed at Cedar Point, Ohio.
2. What does it mean to be a geographer?  https://youtu.be/Jy9iOHD2ZN8   My reflections with career information.
3. Fast-talkin’ geography!  https://youtu.be/BCPAHp5Lid8   
4. Five reasons why geography matters - https://youtu.be/ie088A_kCow  infused with Indian music.
5. Esri videos - lately, I have been showing the "Seeing the Future" video and the "See what others can't" video. 

Because I have created many videos on this topic, I have created some playlists.  On this topic, the Why Geography Matters playlist is particularly relevant:    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0F52D9CC24657023

There are other videos that I frequently use with students, as well, such as the Roger Tomlinson 1967 Data for Decision series, the Esri Career Corner videos, and the Penn State geospatial revolution video series.  What are your favorites? 

I hope that you find these videos useful!

--Joseph Kerski

Training to be a teacher, I learned that I did not need to invent from scratch every part of every lesson every day. I needed instead to be able to identify good resources and know how best to use them for my specific needs. Back before personal computers, it was challenging and time consuming just to find good content, and then to grasp, tweak, and prepare it. Today, teachers need less time to build, but more time to sift, assess, grasp, and practice hands-on for themselves. One “good danger” these days is getting hooked on all the captivating practice available. A great resource is easily accessible, serves broad audiences, supports many concerns and desires, informs quickly, instructs deeply, fosters experimentation, and spawns new work.

A terrific case in point is Esri's Maps for Public Policy, part of the Living Atlas on ArcGIS Online. Without needing even to log in, policy leaders, community activists, and researchers, including teachers and students, can all use this collection easily and powerfully. And because it is online, it works on any internet-connected device, though even the biggest smartphones are too small to provide as much utility as a modest tablet; even the most basic Chromebooks work just fine.

While exploring, I thought about all the hours we social studies teachers spent searching for and struggling to prep data for use with our students. Here is robust content, really a pre-built online atlas, about people across the 50 states, down to neighborhood level, already formatted, so you can focus on your theme of interest, and cross-reference others in search of relationships.

These quick instructions will help you consider, explore, modify, collect, share, research, and use as templates to guide future work:

• https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/blog/maps-inform-public-policy-help-turn-plans-into-actions/
• https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-living-atlas/mapping/make-several-nuanced-policy-ma...
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opx6c8M_YWw

With these as guides, I explored as if leading a high school class in Los Angeles toward their own research projects. Following the process laid out above, I created my own small set of maps in just a few minutes — https://arcg.is/ierq0. Take a look, then create your own at esri.com/policymaps.

[[Update Sept 28, 2020: See also this post by Joseph Kerski in June 2020, and this blog by Charlie Fitzpatrick in Sept 2020]]

When I visited Mark Guizlo, Professor in the Department of Geography and Geospatial Technology at Lakeland Community College Ohio and his colleagues not long ago, I was very impressed at what the faculty and students are doing with geospatial technologies. Recently, Mark was asked by the college president to write the weekly Lakeland “Musings” newsletter.  Mark did so, focusing on a student project and Story Map that was featured on GIS Day to a packed auditorium for a presentation by Kurt Lieber of the Ocean Defenders Alliance. Several things stand out to me about the story map and article below:  (1) This was the professor and the students’ first work with story maps, and yet the map is rigorous and communicates their research well; (2) the students in this course haven’t been using GIS all that long, and yet it shows why GIS is an appropriate research tool; (3) this is the perfect illustration of the important work that community colleges are doing with GIS, research, and communications; (4) the fact that the work incorporates fieldwork (in this case, wet field work; that is, in the water!) is something near and dear to my heart as a geographer. 

Ocean Defenders story map.

Mark writes, "Kurt Lieber got sick and tired of letting ghost gear ruin his dives off the coast of Southern California. Ghost gear consists of abandoned fishing gear and traps that accumulate in some of the most diverse, fragile, and beautiful marine ecosystems. He wanted to help clean up ocean waste, so he joined the Sea Sheppard Foundation in the 1990s, then went on to found Ocean Defender’s Alliance (ODA) in 2002. ODA depends on donors and grants to run expensive boats and pay for the equipment needed to remove abandoned fishing gear from coastal waters in California and Hawaii. They also clean up beaches. In Hawaii, mounds of trash routinely wash up on beaches from the giant central Pacific garbage gyre.

Kurt spoke at Lakeland’s GIS Day on Wednesday, November 13. A native of Northeast Ohio, he told stories of swimming through dead fish, garbage, chemicals, and debris as a Timberlake teenager in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kurt threw himself into the marine conservation effort when he moved to California to pursue his work as an engineer and his passion for diving.

ODA has collected data for every dive and cleanup event from 2002 to the present, and Kurt sent the spreadsheet just a few weeks ago. It was messy. The spreadsheet contained coordinates for their activities for hundreds of dives and some beach cleanups, but it needed a lot of work to prep it for mapping. In other words, it was data from the real world, and not the perfectly tuned data we often use with GIS tutorial manuals. The ODA data was rough, poorly behaved, with a vague whiff of abandoned lobster traps. It needed a cup of coffee and a good shave. This was far from the normal experience of our introductory GIS students in GEOG 1700, where the data they encounter just got dressed up to take grandma to church and sits quietly waiting for instructions.

The students looked concerned reviewing the data in class. I proposed that we throw out the original plan (you know, the project in the syllabus) and map the ODA data before GIS Day. Their reactions ranged from keen interest to outright fear.

They had a lot of questions. I didn’t have a lot of answers. I proposed that we would make a Story Map for their project, and with confidence said “this ODA project is perfect for a story map.” I didn’t tell them I had never made a story map myself. Sometimes, what doesn’t get us fired makes us stronger. We would figure it out later.

Kurt Lieber joined us in class by video link and we planned the project together. I helped the students divide tasks, and they prepped the data. With about 48 hours remaining before GIS Day, the students mapped and created their story map. It was good enough to show on GIS Day.

After Kurt spoke at GIS Day, the students did a great job of presenting their story map with no preparation or even prior warning that they would be on stage. They are Melissa Dopriak, Mason Kirchner, and Josh Lupas, and Ben Sulecki.

Most people think GIS Day is about technology. Sure, there is a lot of technology present, but that isn’t really why we do this annual event. GIS Day is just like the field it represents - it is about people and their ideas, demonstrated through mapping technologies. We seek to build communities of practice that translate creativity, experience, and knowledge into solutions for humanity. In academic terms, we don’t think of the geospatial technology program as a “tech program.” It is in a department that is unique for Lakeland – the Geography and Geospatial Technology Department has a split personality, and it was designed that way on purpose. The traditional liberal arts and sciences meet up with the mapping sciences and technologies. We engage in the study of places, society, and the earth’s environment, and do it through a highly sophisticated set of technological tools. Those tools change constantly, and the key survival skill is thinking and adaptation, rather than just technological mastery. Students are expected to develop a sense of lifelong learning as part of their bridge from being “student” to being employed. I am convinced that we cannot do that without both the general education and the technological sides of our department.

GIS Day is a worldwide celebration of mapping technologies, made possible at Lakeland because of support from the college and the participation of a large number of GIS Professionals. Our Geospatial Program Assistant and Part Time Faculty, Lisa Stanich, organizes GIS Day. Associate Professor Bobby Oliver manages the student volunteers who run hands-on mapping activities with real-world live data. One the best things about GIS Day is that our graduates come back as GIS Professionals to represent their employers and engage in conversations with the students who are just starting out. I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate GIS Day than that."

Thank you Mark!  Kudos to you and your students for the inspiring work you and they are doing! --Joseph Kerski

One of the sections of the ocean themed story map showing the number of and types of species freed from traps and nets.

Open the following blog announcement to learn the updated transition timeline.

Thank you to everyone who celebrated GIS Day 2019.  I invite you to share your experiences and continue the celebration by sending in your GIS Day memories to this survey and view the many events displayed on this map.  As of this writing, a total of 1,583 events have been registered.  The 5 free ArcGIS personal use licenses offered to each event host to distribute and the resources on the www.gisday.com website all appear to have been of high interest.  This essay reports on just a few of the many inspiring stories coming in from government agencies, universities, schools, nonprofit organizations, and private companies that clearly demonstrate how GIS is making a positive difference all around the world.

Agrobiotechnical Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia: Over 100 attendees attended a field day of UAV imaging and a workshop on the processing and interpretation of collected data. The workshop titled “Mapping of agricultural land using an unmanned aerial vehicle” was organized by the members of the Chair of Geoinformation Technologies and GIS and the AgroGIT research team. Visitors were presented with a method of point cloud, digital elevation model, and digital orthophoto generation using the collected images. The role of UAVs in the current scientific work of the research team is presented, as well as all the benefits of using precision agriculture in practice.

University of Osijek, Croatia.

Bangladesh Conservation GIS (BCGIS) and Wildlife Conservation Society:  Mohammad Shamsuddoha, SCGIS Scholar 2017 and Program Officer, Wildlife Conservation Society, organized a GIS Day event in Dhaka, that included a series of events and activities for conservation professionals.  These professionals came from a background in marine biology, Chiropteran biology, ornithology, fisheries, biology, and other fields. This was the first event under BCGIS which was formed by the SCGIS scholars in Bangladesh with a dream to spread the mission and vision of SCGIS.  The event included information sessions, a geospatial quiz, and a hands-on mapping session, where a portion of the participants made their first maps. 

Conservation focused GIS Day event in Bangladesh.

University Jaume I, Spain:  The Geotec group at the university, which is near the Mediterranean Sea on the east side of the country, sponsored another successful GIS Day event.  Geotec is a research group specialized in geospatial technologies and GIS development.   The event was organized around a series of "Missions", which helped participants to understand how GIS is used in different fields and contexts, and they served us as an introduction to the technologies we are using everyday. Missions were perfect examples to explain projects such as A-Wear, SyMptOMS or Copernicus Academy initiative to name a few. Looking for a book in the library using indoor technologies, playing a mobile game inside a building which connects the gameplay with the current place, sharing the location of a horse sculpture at the university campus or write a post about the possible uses of GIS, were some of the missions available to complete. The last mission was to meet the staff and attend to the talk in which our colleague Carlos Granell explained how geospatial technologies supported the missions (see the sketch he prepared below). After the talk, there was opportunity for social networking, and last but not least… some prizes were also raffled.

During the event, more than 100 missions were completed by 26 participants; see the full list of missions and associated apps and tools they used at https://gisday19uji.web.app/ . A press note and some pictures about UJI GISday are also available here https://www.uji.es/com/noticies/2019/11/1q/gis-day/#.  For more information on their event, see this link.

The Government of Upper Austria:   Thomas Ebert from the Land Division of the Government of Upper Austria has been promoting GIS and GIS Day for many years, in conjunction with the Private University of Education.  This year's celebration was one of the finest, with more than 400 students from the region converging on Linz to participate in over 30 workshops filled with hands-on activities focused on geospatial technology.   See this video and these photos to experience it for yourself. 

Part of the GIS Day events in Linz, Austria. 

Clark College and US Forest Service:   Chris Highfield, GIS Services Area Manager from the US Forest Service, reported that "Our GIS Day event was jointly held with the R6 Forest Service Data Resource Management group Customer Service Area 1 and Clark College in Vancouver Washington, who hosted the event on 15 November 2019.  The enthusiasm for the event ran high before, during, and after the event.  In all, 9 lightning talks were held, along with Smokey Bear picture opportunities, food and raffle items, and included people from Clark College, Clark County Planning department, Portland Community College, and Diana Perez from the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.  Our Project Manager (Whitney Vonada) did an outstanding job in pulling together a really awesome event. Those that came were treated to a great experience in learning more about GIS and the Science of Where.  What we learned from this year’s event will be applied to GIS Day 2020!

Clark College and US Forest Service GIS Day event, Vancouver Washington USA. 

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas:  This event was billed as the largest GIS Day event in the world, with over 40 speakers, 30 sessions, and more than 500 attendees.  All of the events were streamed and recorded for later viewing.  This year's events brought geospatial computing sessions on GeoAI, the geospatial internet of things (IoT), frontiers of geospatial data science and data science applications with campus data, and geospatial social media data mining to the schedule.  Event highlights included over $1,000 in prizes and awards, over 20 sponsoring organizations, over 10 organizations looking to hire, a career fair, and a crowdsourcing competition (gisday.tamu.edu).

Guatemala City, Guatemala.  Silvia Paola Forno Lima organized a GIS Day held by the Municipality of Guatemala, Dirección de Información Geográfica Municipal.  See attached flyer for more details on their event. 

Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria:    Professors Vanya Stamenova and Stefan Stamenov, students, and others participated in the GIS Day organized by Esri Bulgaria that included an exhibition "Capitals" devoted to the 140th anniversary of the establishment of Sofia as a capital of Bulgaria.

GIS Day event at the Hotel Balkan in Sofia.

Paris Training Center, Sudan:  750 people attended an event sponsored by the Paris Training Center in Sudan.  The event began with seminars about GIS applications and the importance of GIS in our daily lives, as well as using GIS to achieve sustainable development goals. Workshops were conducted about GIS application with students, followed by a tour of the GIS posters, finishing up with a photo session and musical party.

GIS Day celebration in Sudan.

On the Pakistan-China border:  Survey123 and GIS were celebrated by creating awareness and work the study areas of Himalay, Karakoram, and Pamir.  Students and specialists from different organizations and educators traveled from Islamabad to Khujerab to a point on the China border at 16,000 feet (4,877 m) in elevation. During the journey, tourism points, wildlife species, disaster prone areas, landslide hot spots, check points, and other important points were captured using Survey123. On the border between Pakistan and China, a one-day workshop was conducted.   (Joseph's note:  A beautiful and fascinating place to hold a GIS workshop!).

Way up high--GIS Day on the Pakistan-China border.

Weld County Colorado:  Weld County, the Cities of Greeley and Evans, and the University of Northern Colorado teamed up to organize and invite local middle and high school students for a complete GIS experience. The organizing led by Geography, GIS, and Sustainability Professor Jieun Lee  team created a Zombie Apocalypse Emergency scenario using Survey123, ArcGIS Online (for locating and neutralizing zombies), and an operations dashboard so students can excitingly submerge themselves in GIS experience. Their event was featured in the newspaper The Greeley Tribune.

Images of Weld County Colorado's GIS Day event.

Fayetteville State University, North Carolina:  Organized by Professor of Geospatial Science Dr Trung Vinh Tran, the third Annual GeoWeek and GIS 2019 Fayetteville State University included multiple activities. See the attachment for the program or visit this website. This year's multiple day program included speakers from the City of Fayetteville, Esri, the NGA Support Team – Army, 18th Airborne Corps, FT Bragg, the university History Program, and the Drone company Nine Ten Drones LLC, among others.

Clemson University Center for Geospatial Technologies:  Clemson University's GIS events spanned two days, attracted over 425 people, and featured a series of lightning talks, a 3D printed model of campus coloring contest (which I thought was one of the most clever ideas I've ever seen), a VR topographic sandbox, exhibitors, and much more. I participated in the Clemson University event by giving a lightning talk on 5 forces in GIS, 5 trends in GIS, and 5 skills for GIS, meetings with faculty from across the campus to support their work in GIS, and conducting two hands-on workshops for students in spatial analysis in ArcGIS Online and in Business Analyst web.  I was joined by two colleagues, Geoff Taylor and Zemin Dhanani, two proud Clemson alums now working for Esri, and was inspired by everyone I met and learned from.  See attached for flyer for this event.

GIS Day event at Clemson University. 

Painting contest at Clemson University where participants painted 3D models of campus that were printed on a 3D printer and made from UAV imagery. 

The Where in the World map contest at Clemson University was particularly challenging because many of the images were of fictitious places created for movies or books.

Central Idaho:   Kara Utter and the Central Idaho GIS User's Group organized this year's GIS Day with raffle prizes sponsored by Esri and other items sponsored by the Northern Rockies Chapter of URISA. The diversity in
backgrounds of attendees provided for great discussion and awesome networking opportunities. Lines of communication were opened between GIS entities throughout the Central Idaho Region from local city and county governments to the US Forest Service, Surveyors and the DOD's Environmental Management Office.  A committee was formed and tasked with determining how multiple jurisdictions can come together and create authoritative datasets.  Enterprise Portal sharing through Sites or ArcGIS Online Sharing through Hub was introduced as a way that they can all collaborate more efficiently.  Ideas for bringing GIS to the classrooms and for the planning of GIS
community projects were discussed, and finally, thank you cards were written and sent to mentors, which was an idea given in the 101 things to do on GIS Day blog essay. 

The University of Illinois at Chicago:  Dr Moira Zellner, professor in the department of urban planning and policy and director of the Urban Data Visualization Lab, organized an event at the University of Illinois at Chicago that was held at the Richard J. Daley Library, open to the public, and featured a range of techniques exploring different aspects of Community and Global Disparities. It included a keynote speaker, presentations, a panel, a poster session and competition, and a hands on-workshop. GIS Day brings an opportunity to learn about innovative techniques and impactful applications, and network with others interested in or working on a range of visualization approaches to classwork, research or professional activities.

The University of Southern California's Spatial Sciences Institute:  An event organized by Dr Laura Loyola of the Spatial Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California brought Tom Vo to speak at USC's 2019 GIS Day celebration.  The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) is charged with creating a dynamic growth vision for Southern California. At SCAG’s Research and Analysis Department, Tom Vo is utilizing GIS to solve local and regional issues and promote more housing, transportation accessibility and sustainability of cities in Southern California.  Andrej (Andy) Rutkowski, of the USC Libraries, in conjunction with the UCLA Institute for Digital Research, organized a USC vs UCLA Battle of the Maps event, where students from both universities mapped areas changed by natural disasters. The focus was on how climate change is impacting the environment and ways a person can make a difference through mapping on Humanitarian OpenStreetMap projects in Tegal Indonesia and in Central Asia.  Collectively, 77 mappers from USC and 68 from UCLA mapped nearly 20,000 buildings!

USC vs UCLA Battle of the Maps! 

GIS Day event at the University of Southern California.

Finally, shared by Esri Canada is this GIS Day cake from the land where GIS began--Canada (eh!).

Which would you prefer?  Newfoundland or Baffin Island? 

The idea behind Mapillary is a simple but powerful one:  Take photos of a place of interest as you walk, bike, drive, or however else you move across the landscape using the Mapillary mobile app.  The app takes photographs automatically, which you then upload to the Mapillary database.  Once there, they are wonderfully combined into a ground photo view that is a bit like Google’s StreetView, showing you a digital virtual path of how you traversed the landscape.  Mapillary is part of the rapidly growing crowdsourcing citizen science movement, which seeks to generate “volunteered geographic information” content from ordinary citizens.  In fact, Mapillary is helping to generate critical infrastructure and natural resource inventory in places around the world that have no national mapping agency or local GIS data.  Mapillary is therefore helping to create a data-informed citizenry that can more effectively plan resilient, safe, and thriving communities.  As part of the growing set of artificial intelligence tools, Mapillary can also automatically extract map features from images—light poles, trees, benches, curbs, and so on.  While I have written about Mapillary in the past, and regularly include Mapillary in my field workshops, in this essay I wish to provide an update for people already familiar with this tool, and introduce new people to these exciting capabilities.  

Mapillary is much more than a set of tools–it is a community, with its own MeetUps and ambassadors, and it is an Esri partner.  At the time of this writing, over 710 million images have been contributed, covering over 8.6 million kilometers.  Currently, the site’s leaderboard shows that the top 50 users have submitted over 1 million images each, with the leader at 18 million images and nearly 300,000 km.  I currently have submitted 2,400 images covering 24 km.  I have a long way to go: Ah!  More fieldwork!

There are many uses for Mapillary in education, and I have explored all of the following with students at the secondary, university, and informal education (libraries, museums, after-school clubs) level over the past few years in a wide variety of settings and institutions.  First, I use Mapillary to help students explore places of interest from thousands of users around the world.  The Mapillary map page linked to images allows instructors and students to play sequences of images in a flowing video style that provides a powerful immersive experience of thousands of landscapes and places around the world.  What clues do the vegetation, land use, building type, weather, and place names give about the climate, ecoregions, biomes, history, and culture of the area?  These images and maps can be powerful sources of inquiry, prompting investigations using other sources and drawing on content knowledge in history, environmental studies, geography, earth science, and even language arts, as I explain in this video.

To examine the map and images, from the main page, under the Imagery tile, select “Explore coverage.”  A global map will open with the Mapillary data collected shown in green.  For example, if you zoom to Melbourne Australia, you will see a large circular feature that I collected in Royal Park, shown below.  You can see the photographs I took on a fine late winter day as I was walking to the University of Melbourne to teach a GIS workshop.  Look at those fantastic Australian trees!  You can also tick the “Play” button in the image to “travel” around the circle as I did, in your case, virtually, using the images.  Note how each image indicates where on the map it was captured and what direction from straight ahead I took it.  You can also play the sequence in full screen mode with the map in the corner, turn on object detection,....  

Try walking along my route through Royal Park in Melbourne by clicking on the forward and backward arrows in the above immersive view collected with Mapillary!

Example set of Mapillary points and images I collected in Royal Park in Melbourne Australia. 

Second, I use Mapillary with students in the field to create data, and encourage faculty reading this to do the same with your own students.  You will need to register for a free Mapillary account to do this.  After obtaining your free account, download the Mapillary app for your phone.  You can use this Mapillary app to create photos and maps to document a field trip to your local wetland, rainforest, prairie, or urban neighborhood, and if you cannot get off campus, use the tools to walk every pathway on campus.  The Mapillary app is free and fun to use, and can spark discussions such as “how does the app determine my location?” and “how does the app know what direction I am pointing my phone?”  As you collect tracks, they will be visible on the web map along with the global community’s tracks, and also, your own tracks will be visible as “uploads” on your phone app (shown below).

My set of Mapillary images currently online.

For students who become familiar with creating Esri ArcGIS Online maps and Esri Storymaps, Mapillary images can be embedded in these types of multimedia maps.  Start simply by downloading one image from Mapillary, such as mine, here, in Melbourne, using the Download Image while logged into Mapillary:  https://images.mapillary.com/VdjXFuVzWX9Y1se9qN89rA/thumb-2048.jpg.   Add this into a Map in ArcGIS Online.  Make a story map and experiment with this image.  Or, link to the image online.  See below for example.

Example Mapillary image embedded in a map note in ArcGIS Online.  Try it yourself with my image:  https://images.mapillary.com/VdjXFuVzWX9Y1se9qN89rA/thumb-2048.jpg. 

Mapillary provides map data as a subscription and downloads are requested through Mapillary for Organizations.  Mapillary for Organizations is a workspace that anyone with a Mapillary account can create. Within an organization, there can be multiple individual accounts. Thus, it provides a way to organize capture projects and request data for your area of interest, rather like putting together a team for mapping purposes.  To use data for educational purposes, you should focus on data that you or your students have collected. 

You can download your Mapillary map data and bring it into ArcGIS Online.  The data gets extracted as a GeoJSON file, which you can add to your ArcGIS Online map as I will explain below.  Go to your sequence in the web mapping app >  click the three dots in the bottom right corner, as shown below:

The 3 dots on your collected track that allow you to download your data for use in ArcGIS. 

After clicking on the 3 dots, select: > Advanced options" > "Download lines" to get the trace of your track:

Downloading your Mapillary track.

After selecting Download Lines, a GeoJSON file will open up in a web browser tab.  Right click somewhere on in the white space where there is no text, and > "save as." Change the filetype to "all files" and then add the ".geojson" extension to the file name. Alternatively, in a web browser where you are displaying the GeoJSON file, copy all of its contents, paste it into Notepad, and name the file appropriately, such as Melbourne_track.geojson.  Your system will likely add “.txt” to the end of the file name.  If so, rename the file and take off the “.txt” extension. 

Once you have your GeoJSON file, go to ArcGIS Online > Add Data > Add from file, and point to your geojson file.  Symbolize the tracks in the area on user name so you can determine which track is your own, as I did, below:

Alternatively, you could add your GeoJSON file as a file to your ArcGIS Online content, thereby creating a feature service from it.  Then, you can add it to your map, and filter on the user name to only see your own track, as shown in this web map of mine, here.  Now that it is a feature service, it is an even more powerful layer than simply a map element, that you can now use as input to your spatial analysis tools, such as buffer, overlay, and more. 

Next, for enhanced geo-visualization, try bringing your Mapillary track into the 3D scene viewer in ArcGIS Online, as I did here; see below.

Mapillary track in a Esri ArcGIS 3D scene.

Close up of Mapillary track in 3D scene viewer using a hiker as the symbol.

Want to dig deeper?  You can even extract features from the images; see more information here on map features, and the help page about how to bring data to ArcGIS Online.  When you do so, you are using Artificial Intelligence in action!  See an example of features in the benches example below, along with my track.  The benches have been extracted with the Mapillary algorithms from the images on my track.

Example set of Mapillary features in ArcGIS Online.   Mapillary uses computer vision, a form of artificial intelligence, to automatically identify and extract map objects like these benches.

Next, use these guidelines to start building story maps with Mapillary sequences.  Essentially you will get the embed code for the Mapillary image, its thumbnail, and the geographic coordinates.  As they are working through the procedures, show them this example set of stories and this story map of a refugee camp for inspiration.

For students who become familiar with using Esri’s Web App Builder, you might also encourage them to try the Mapillary Widget, which allows for the viewing of Mapillary street-level images.

I encourage you to use these Mapillary tools to enhance your fieldwork, teach about apps, Web GIS, and crowdsourcing, and to improve the spatial thinking of your students.

For more information, see my related essay on the Mapillary blog.