New Book: Creating a Smarter Campus: GIS for Education
Discover how educators, researchers, IT support, and administrators can transform education inside and out, now and for the future with a new book from Esri Press, entitled Creating a Smarter Campus: GIS for Education.
Geographic information system (GIS) technology offers a powerful decision-making tool in various aspects of education. It gives educators a new opportunity to teach problem-solving to a tech-savvy generation of learners. Researchers can use GIS for data visualization and integration, and IT professionals can improve the offerings of their cloud-based platforms. GIS offers administrators a way to visualize and manage everything from mapping campus buildings to planning where and when to close schools and open new ones.
This book is designed to help those in education focus on issues that matter to them right now. It is a guide to taking the first steps with GIS, with these stories as inspiration, and applying location intelligence to decisions and operational processes to solve problems and create a more collaborative environment in their organization. Use this book to identify where maps, spatial analysis, and GIS apps might be useful in your work, and then learn more about these resources.
Creating a Smarter Campus: GIS for Education explores a collection of real-life stories about education organizations doing just that with GIS. Through their ideas, plans, and goals, they help readers understand how to use GIS and integrate spatial reasoning into teaching, research, and management. A “next steps” section provides ideas, strategies, tools, and actions to help you jump-start using GIS for education. A collection of online resources, including additional stories, videos, new ideas and concepts, and downloadable tools and content, complements this book.
I had the pleasure of editing this book with Esri content strategist Matt Artz. I can personally attest that reading and assembling these stories of people making a positive impact on their very own campuses with GIS was inspiring.
The book is divided into 4 sections -- educators, researchers, IT support, and administrators, and includes stories from a wide range of campuses from schools to universities, from small to large. Stories include those about water quality, geo-games, water quality, wildlife studies, making GIS accessible across the campus, integrating GIS and CAD for planning, crowdsourcing a university's facility mapping, and many more.
What's more, the problems that students, faculty, and campus administrators are solving extend beyond the campus--many, such as accessibility, recycling, safety, tree management, and more, are some of the same problems that cities are facing. Applying the spatial perspective through GIS will empower these students to be change agents in whatever sector of society they work in after they graduate. It empowers these schools, community, technical, and tribal colleges, and universities to demonstrate leadership in their regions and work closely with community leaders outside the campus.
