Education Blog

What are the most important things for students to learn in our rapidly changing world?  In this essay and video, I describe the 10 most important things that I believe are important for student learning and invite your feedback. 

Grim, recent hurricane events shows once again how and why GIS is an effective tool for emergency response when lives are imperiled and property devastated.  In education, GIS can help students at all levels and across many disciplines understand the spatial and temporal patterns of hurricanes and typhoons from global to local scales.  This set of resources was written with heavy hearts for all those recently affected with an aim to help students and faculty become empowered with learning and teaching about these disastrous events. 

Explore school classroom resources from Esri celebrating Earth Science Week. New resources added daily the week of October 14.

Of all of the activities I have created, tested, and used with students over the years, one seems to be often cited by students as memorable and impactful:  Asking students to create sketch maps of their childhood neighborhood.  In this essay and guidelines, I describe this activity with an encouragement for you to use it or your own modification of it in your own instruction.

An intermediate-level story maps workshop was recently developed and taught by my colleague and I for students, researchers, and faculty in a university, but it could be used in other educational settings where people want to further develop their story map skills.

This article describes a new Digital Earth set of online courses that my colleagues at the University of Denver and I developed, invites you to join in on this exciting opportunity to deepen your investigation of Earth processes, patterns, and trends through geotechnologies, and to share the course with others who might think of geotechnologies as "just maps."

Learn about the Esri Innovation Program (EIP) 2024 Student of Year nominations -  part of research projects, course work, or skills development.  

2024 Esri Imagery and remote Sensing Educators Summit is an annual virtual event on May 22, 2024, hosted by Esri Education team, in collaboration with other teams at Esri and academic partners.  

Here are links to resources presented during the event.

Drones are becoming more popular and accessible for various applications, such as surveying, monitoring, inspection, and research. Drone imagery has become a popular input data for image and GIS analysis. 

Processing drone imagery and creating useful information products are skills that students should learn before they can use them for analysis.   That's where ArcGIS Drone2Map comes in handy.

I have written a fundamentals of mapping and GIS in the Fourth Edition of Key Methods of Geography textbook, published by Sage Publications.  If you are seeking a single chapter about what GIS is and why it matters, this might very well fit that need.  Beyond my chapter, the book contains a great deal of pertinent content about, as the title indicates, key core methods essential for the geographic sciences, including field data collection equipment and methods, statistical analysis, spatial analysis, remote sensing, and much more.