Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

How can story maps be used to learn about physical and cultural geography?  This story map with 30 visits along 40 degrees north latitude can serve as an illustration for (1) the kinds of questions you could pose in your instruction while engaging students in spatial thinking with web GIS maps, and (2) the types of things you can do when you and your students create maps and apps (including story maps) in the ArcGIS platform.   To be able to pinpoint exact locations on the Earth, and on the oceans, our world has been "overlaid" with reference lines of latitude and longitude. From 0 degrees latitude to 90 degrees north (North Pole) to 90 degrees south (South Pole), the latitude lines run east-west. Longitude lines run north-south, from 0 degrees longitude running through the North Pole through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich England, to France, Spain, and running out to the Atlantic at Ghana in West Africa, all the way to the South Pole. The lines of west longitude run north-south west of the Prime Meridian to 180 West, in the Pacific Ocean, and the lines of east longitude run north-south east of the Prime Meridian to the same line, 180 East, in the Pacific Ocean. The lines are further subdivided into units of minutes and seconds to provide precise locations on the Earth.  I explain this in more detail, including the International Meridian Conference, in my book Interpreting Our World. This story map is a tour of 30 points along one of these lines--40 degrees north latitude, of 4/9th of the way from the Equator to the North Pole. Over a span of over 20 years, I visited each of these points along 40 Degrees North Latitude across the USA and into Europe and it can be used in a lesson in instructional settings. Each of these points along 40 degrees north is also located on an exact full-degree of longitude, such as 40 North Latitude, 100 Degrees West Longitude, in other words, where those lines intersect on the surface. This map and these photographs serve 3 purposes: (1) To serve as an effective teaching tool to foster learning about physical and cultural geography. (2) To encourage you to think about how you can use ArcGIS Online and story maps for your own investigations, and to communicate the results of those investigations to others. (3) To encourage you to get out into the field, observe, gather data, and think about the landscape. Be a map and photo detective! Careful observations will help you answer these questions. To use the map to teach physical and cultural geography, for each point, consider the following 20 questions. Then, think of your own questions to ask! Who were the original Native inhabitants of this area? What lifestyles did they have, and what was their range? What induced people to settle in this area, past and present? What is the present day density of population here? Using the map, how far is this point from the nearest town? What landforms are dominant? What is the dominant ecoregion and biome? You may need to do some outside research to discover the answer. For example, you could use the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World biomes and ecoregions maps for this purpose. Name 2 characteristics of the vegetation in this area. How abundant is it? How healthy would you say the plants are here? What can you observe about the dominant climate here? In what season of the year was this photo taken? At what time of day was this photo taken? Describe the weather here on the day this photo was taken. Can you find any evidence of water in this image? If so, what form does that water take? How much variation can you find in the physical characteristics in the foreground vs the background of this image? What are the natural hazards that pose the most threat to this area? Can you find any evidence of human impact on the landscape? If so, what is it? Would you say humans have influenced this landscape a small, moderate, or great amount, or not influenced it at all? What is the dominant land use in this area? How much natural and human-influenced change does this area experience? Compare the change in this area to your own community. How different did this area look 100 years ago? How different will it look 100 years from now? What plan would you put in place in this area to protect its natural beauty and to ensure health for its inhabitants? This story map that you are reading also shows the rapid evolution the Web GIS platform--specifically, ArcGIS and story maps. About a decade ago, I created  this story map on this same topic, here.  You can see how much more immersive and experiential this story map is compared to the one I made in 2012. Also notable is the fact that I created the 2022 story map in a fraction of the time that the 2012 map required. This is triple good news: As the ArcGIS platform evolves, the tools become more powerful, more engaging, and require less time to learn about and create. I visited these locations in conjunction with the  Degree Confluence Project.  I encourage you to get onto the landscape in conjunction with something you are interested in, collect data, and observe! A portion of the story map showing the points along 40 North Latitude--and there is one more far to the east, in Spain. A portion of the story map showing some of the points along 40 North Latitude.  Another point is far to the east, in Spain. One of the points where physical and cultural geography is investigated. One of the points along 40 North Latitude, in Utah, where the physical and cultural geography are investigated. ... View more

I developed a GIS set of teaching materials to support higher education environmental science that instructors might wish to use in their own instruction and that students may wish to use to improve their GIS, spatial thinking, and problem-solving skills. These materials can be used in a two-day workshop, or they could be used as needed throughout the semester in environmental science or GIS courses.  Updated:   March 2022.    These materials are designed to: 1. Develop knowledge and skills in geotechnologies focusing on environmental applications: GIS, remote sensing, and GPS/GNSS, technical skills and foundational underpinnings, cloud and SaaS data sources and formats, multimedia, data quality; projections, symbolizing, georeferencing, measurement, classification, databases, and mobile workflows. 2. Develop workforce awareness of pathways in environmental careers that use GIS and how to prepare for them. 3. Develop confidence that you can use these skills and perspectives to move forward with your own career.   My philosophy in developing and teaching this content is as follows: • This is your workshop/course. Let me know how I and my team can help you today and in the future as you use geotechnologies. • Using geotechnologies effectively is a journey that will require building a network with your colleagues. • We will not work with every GIS tool and data set that exists in this workshop or course, but we will build a foundation so that you will be empowered and feel confident that you can be successful in these tools, data, and workflows. • The activities include core themes and skills that can be used in many aspects of environmental work.   These resources use the following tools:  ArcGIS Online, web mapping applications such as Dashboards and Storymaps, and the Survey123 field data collection tool.  For more advanced work, there are links to ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Insights.  The resources include the exploration of data from local to global scale, including ecoregions, river systems, population change, historical and current satellite imagery, human health, weather and climate, and natural hazards.  The field activity involves gathering tree type, height, species, and condition on whatever campus you happen to be teaching or working in.    Underlying these resources are the following themes: (1)  Geotechnologies are critically important tools in environmental science to build a healthier, more sustainable future. (2)  Geotechnologies are essential tools for your environmental career:  They enable you to apply your environmental skills and knowledge and contribute to the work that nonprofits, government agencies, private industry, and academia is using everyday. (3)  Modern cloud-enabled GIS tools and spatial data mean that it is easier than ever to learn how to apply GIS to solve problems.    The attached document contains the workflow and all the links for the workshop to be successful.  I hope this resource is useful.    ... View more

My colleague James Rattling Leaf and I created a story map on the Lakota language.   We had 2 goals in doing so:  (1)  We have long been interested in and collaborated on projects involving education, maps, and GIS, and wanted to illustrate how the story maps platform can be used to learn and teach about Native Languages, beginning with Lakota. When you access the story map, and step through its contents, you will be able to hear audio of a dozen words that are in both Lakota and English, a photograph of each spoken feature, and what that feature looks like on satellite image and topographic maps.  Note:  I updated the spellings during June 2023 to reflect the Lakota diacritical marks and added additional information.  (2)  We wanted to draw attention to the serious situation that many Native or indigenous languages around the world are endangered.  By coupling visual cues with audio, we hope to inspire others living on the Lakota lands, those working with language projects such as Recovering Voices, at the WoLakota Project, at the Language Conservancy, and others, to not only to keep this and other languages alive, but to help them to thrive and grow, and to create a community of practice.  For more story maps and other resources, see the indigenous languages across Canada resources from Canadian Geographic. We hope the reader will take these ideas and do even more with the story maps platform and other web mapping applications.  For example, you could embed these story maps in web pages; you could add video to the maps (as we illustrated with the word "lake"), you could create different types of story maps, dashboards, instant apps, infographics, and much more.  For learning about language, place, biology, history, geography, and many other themes, integrating audio and video with maps is becoming an easy-to-understand medium and yet a very powerful one.  Entire narratives of tribal elders speaking about locations, events, people, and other things of significance could be added to maps such as this.   In addition, quizzes can be embedded into story maps to help people learn a Native language such as Lakota.   Part of the Lakota language story map. Story maps are part of a rapidly evolving geotechnology platform.  Compare the above Lakota story map, for example, with the first one we created, and the changes will be evident.   Plus, the story map from 2022 took only a fraction of the time that the original story map required!   It shows that the tools become more powerful and easier to use as time advances.  Give these techniques a try!   ... View more

Story maps can serve a wide variety of purposes, one of which is to provide an easy-to-create, engaging way of showcasing your campus in an interactive tour.  Such maps can help new students and faculty get oriented, can serve as ways that prospective students and employees can tour the campus from faraway places and then when they arrive on site, can serve as ways for you to showcase innovative programs and people on campus, and much more.  These maps can be shared with and worked on with the campus visual communciations and recuitment programs and could serve to attract people to your campus.  These maps can also be made for primary and secondary schools as a way of helping students think about and take care of their school grounds, to think spatially, and use technology in meaningful ways.  It can give them a sense of pride to be authors of their campus maps! When I arrive on a university or community or tribal college campus to conduct a series of invited workshops or presentations, I often create a story map or web map on my way to the buildings in which I am speaking.  I use photos and videos I take on my phone with the location services "on" so they can be easily geotagged and included in popups.   I have compiled some of these maps into a gallery shown here.  These should be considereed "introductory" story maps because the purpose of these maps are to help my audiences realize that these web maps can be created in very little time and yet can tell a compelling story.  Because I want to demonstrate that each took me just 15 to 30 minutes to create, I resist the temptation to edit them later and improve their cartography or content.  It is my hope that in so doing, those I show these maps to when I am on those campuses can think of the issues or themes that they would like to gather data on, to map, and to study.  You can learn how to create a gallery of your own maps here like the one I created or you can create a story map collection.  I created the above gallery using the classic story maps templates.  But the ArcGIS story maps give you even more capabilities in an even easier to use single template of tools.  Here is an example set of story maps of campuses: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/c66f04f1b1584a04b1650e4076232ff6 As you can see in this collection, campus story maps can be focused on a specific theme, such as historical buildings and events, sustainability, art, diversity, and much more.  Even more powerful than the tools themselves is the practice of teaching with elements of the ArcGIS platform including story maps.  When students work with these mapping tools, they consider a theme, problem, or issue they want to investigate, they work with a wide variety of data, they develop GIS skills such as symbology and classification, they think about how to communicate that data effectively.  You can use Survey123, for example, to set up a crowdsourced survey to involve hundreds of people walking around on campus collecting data on specific themes.  The data that those people collect could feed the resulting story map, which then dynamically reflects your campus community's input.  In the above set is one of my favorite maps, in part because I teach frequently at the University of Colorado, and also because I love trees and have always considered creating tree inventories as a noble endeavor: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/c66f04f1b1584a04b1650e4076232ff6?item=3 Digging Deeper.  You can do even more than create story maps -- you could integrate your campus mapping efforts with the facility management teams on your campus so they can be leveraged for campus safety, infrastructure mapping, managing events such as concerts and football games, and much more.  In addition, you can contribute some of that data to the topographic basemap in ArcGIS Online, via the Esri Campus Mapping Program.  For some excellent examples, investigate the following campus maps from Stanford, Clemson, Harvard, Univeristy of Texas at Austin, Northwest Missouri State, Ohio State, and UNC Chapel Hill.   Some of these include an entire set of themes, some include 3D, some include indoor spaces, and others incoporate other features that should provide many ideas and inspiration.  Part of the 3D maps at Harvard University.  Give these techniques a try and I look forward to your comments. ... View more

What are the best resources to teach GIScience?  The array of textbooks, lessons, blog essays, software tools, and other resources continues to expand in volume and in the diversity of applications and in domain areas.  One of the best content resources in my judgement is the Body of Knowledge from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS).  The UCGIS is a non-profit organization that creates and supports communities of practice for GIScience research, education, and policy endeavors in higher education and with allied institutions. It is the professional hub and organization for the academic GIS community in the United States, with partnerships extending this capacity abroad.  Why is the UCGIS Body of Knowledge among the best to use for GIS instruction?  In my view, there are six main reasons, though I could argue that more reasons exist.  The attached document explains those reasons and includes the complete set of 15 activities.  This video also describes these activities.  The UCGIS Body of Knowledge has roots in some major curricular resources of the past but is relevant for today:  It is current, authoritative, and rigorous. Linking the UCGIS Body of Knowledge to Hands-on Activities Because the focus of the GIS&T Body of Knowledge is education, and because much of that education is aimed at practical ways of teaching, each chapter includes learning objectives and instructional assessment questions that instructors can use to teach the specific concepts.  However, one thing that is missing in my view is a set of practical activities that instructors could use to teach each concept.  Because my career focus is on GIS in education, and because I have spent many years writing GIS-based curricular items for lesson libraries, journals, and books, I thought it would be instructive and helpful to the community to illustrate how selected content from the Body of Knowledge could be taught using today’s modern web GIS tools, maps and apps, and data.   Why are such a set of activities needed?  First, GIS is a visual language, and hands-on activities with maps and visualizations is a natural fit and a logical aid in the learning of GIS.  Second, GIS is an applied methodology; an approach to solving problems.  The best way to learn GIS is to use it to analyze patterns, relationships, and trends, and to solve problems in our 21st Century world.  Third, instructors are busy people, and they often lack the time to develop their own activities to teach fundamental concepts, particularly activities that are based on a rapidly evolving platform such as GIS.   By providing these activities, my aim is to provide students with thoughtful and useful activities to cement their readings of concepts in the UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge, and to provide instructors with ways of teaching those concepts. Furthermore, I propose that an expanded version of this concept of linking foundational chapters in the Body of Knowledge to activities be published as an e-Book and library to accompany the Body of Knowledge.  Such a book could be useful to instructors in GIS&T, and also in other disciplines looking for ways to incorporate hands-on activities to foster critical thinking, spatial thinking, and problem solving in their curriculum, courses, and programs.  I look forward to hearing the community’s reaction to such a proposal.  Who has time, interest, and expertise to take this concept and the examples I have written here, and expand this to a full e-Book?  For this proof of concept, I have chosen 5 selected Body of Knowledge chapters to teach from using hands-on activities.  These include two that I authored or co-authored and three additional chapters: Location Privacy. GIS&T Education and Training. Error-based Uncertainty.   Scale and Generalization. Common Thematic Map Types. For each chapter, I have created 3 activities.  These activities are meant as a proof of concept.  Many more activities are possible given the ready availability of GIS tools and data sets. These activities can be used as is, but I also encourage you be creative—mix and match, and modify activities as you see fit to meet your course and program objectives. The Activities:  Overview: 1.  Location Privacy. A)  Teaching location privacy and resolution with a big pixel image. B)  Considering location privacy when sharing photos. C)  Investigating ethics and location privacy through case studies. 2.  GIS&T Education and Training. A)  Teaching spatial thinking and geotechnology skills through mapping business locations.    B)  Investigating international migration through a web mapping application. C)  Examining the world’s water balance through a web mapping application. 3.  Error-based Uncertainty.   A)  Analyzing earthquakes in ArcGIS Online. B)  Cartographic vs. Geographic Basemaps:  USGS Topographic Maps Example. C)  Considering sampling frequency in mapping:  Real-time weather investigation. 4.  Scale and Generalization. A)  Investigating coordinate precision. B)  Investigating building footprints in ArcGIS Online. C)  Walking on Water?  Investigating resolution and scale. 5.  Common Thematic Map Types. A)  Examining color on maps using the Color Brewer. B)  Investigating dot density maps with ArcGIS Online. C)  Mapping isolines with Axis Maps contour tools. Selected images from these activities are shown below.   See attached for the full set of 15 activities.   I look forward to your feedback! --Joseph Kerski     ... View more

Where can I find geospatial data? How do I know if that data is any good? How can I teach about societal issues around data?  In this truly "big data" GIS world in which we live, work, and teach, these topics are more important than ever.  Who created the data that I have ready access to?  Can I trust it?  What data can and should I share?  This new presentation and accompanying videos addresses each of these data-focused themes, offering fresh and practical ways to find, assess, and teach about data and society within GIS and other courses.  The societal issues include copyright and permissions, data quality, map accuracy, location privacy, ethics, and more.  Teaching about data can and should evolve as GIS has evolved, and far from a dry, boring topic, can be taught in a compelling way with interactive examples and vibrant discussions!  The purpose of these resources are to: 1.  Empower you with skills to find geospatial data for your teaching, research, or project. 2.  Enable you to be able to make wise decisions about whether your data is appropriate for your needs. 3.  Provide you with resources to teach societal issues surrounding data, such as location privacy, data quality, copyright, and ethics. 4.  Connect you to available Esri support and resources so you can keep learning in these important areas. The presentation is provided as an attachment to this blog essay as a PDF:  56 slides.  The slides begin with an explanation of how data fits into modern web based GIS, characteristics of geospatial data, sources of data, past vs. present approaches to thinking about, teaching about, and gathering data, data skills in demand, data science, strategies for finding geospatial data, a case study of these strategies in action, assessing data quality and why it matters, societal implications, ethics, teaching about data strategies, and the slides end with links to additional learning resources, including the Spatial Reserves data blog that arose from an Esri Press book that Jill Clark and I wrote.  The videos are online here: Full video:  48 minutes. Alternatively, the video is provided in 3 parts: Part 1: 17 minutes. Part 2:  14 minutes. Part 3:  16 minutes. Teaching and learning about geospatial data.  ... View more

The new ArcGIS Online map viewer, which debuted in early 2021, contains many enhancements that instructors, researchers, students, and others are finding incredibly useful.   One advantage the new viewer has over what is now known as the "classic viewer" is improved popup imagery functionality.   Consider the popup size in one of my vegetation surveys as mapped in ArcGIS Online classic viewer, below. While you can click on the image and pull it up as a larger size in a separate browser tab, the image in the map popup is rather small.  In the new map viewer, you can make the popup larger.  To do this, change the "show as list" from the list list mode to gallery mode as shown below.  The gallery mode makes the images much larger.  Plus, you can dock or undock the popups in the new map viewer for additional flexibility.   Equally wonderful is that apps that are based on the new map viewer also take advantage of this and other new capabilities.  These include story maps, dashboards, and more.  See my example below that shows the side-by-side comparison of a dashboard I built for a storm drains education project with the new viewer (left side) vs the classic viewer (right side).   This may seem like a small enhancement, but was a desire voiced by many educators over the years.  The message is:  Keep those suggestions coming!  Our education team is in continued close communication with our product developers and other tools and we relay these suggestions directly to them.  --Joseph Kerski   ... View more

If we agree that fostering spatial thinking in education and in society is important, how can we know if we are succeeding in that effort?  Many people rightly want to find out what the most effective ways of measuring spatial thinking are and how to implement them.  Assessing spatial thinking has been discussed over the past few decades in venues from research articles to conference panel sessions, resulting in a small but growing set of spatial thinking measures.  In this essay I describe a new spatial thinking test that is straightforward but one that could provide numerous benefits to instructors and even to the students taking the test.  A key way of fostering spatial thinking is the use of GIS technology and approaches in education.  This has been the subject of many essays in this Esri education community space, theses and dissertations by students from all over the world, research articles such as here and here, and even entire books such as ones I have co-written and many others that my colleagues have written such as here.  I recently wrote this essay describing 10 key educational benefits in teaching with GIS.   One benefit cited by many is spatial thinking (read my own definition of it). During my early USGS days, I used a stereoscope and aerial photo pairs to assess students' spatial thinking abilities.  This was a perennially popular activity that I have now brought into the modern GIS world, as I explain below. Assessing the results of spatial thinking is complicated, messy, and influenced by many variables, including the method used to foster it, the instructional setting, the learning styles and background of the student, and many others. Despite the challenges, educators and others have attempted to devise and test assessments that measure spatial thinking.  Most of these are focused on the broad definition of spatial thinking, which includes cognitive psychology.  Spatial thinking is much broader in scope than geospatial thinking. Spatial thinking tests often include rotating 2D and 3D shapes, such as this one from Newton and Bristoll (you can take or give this type of spatial thinking test yourself here).  The attention that spatial thinking is beginning to receive in disciplines outside of geography, GIS, and environmental studies has netted some spatial visualization measures in those disciplines, too, such as in engineering.  Most of us in geotechnology education are really most focused on geospatial thinking.  Geospatial thinking assessments are fewer in number than those in the wider "spatial thinking" research community.  That said, several geospatial thinking tests/assessments have been developed and successfully used.  The most oft-cited is probably Lee and Bednarz' Spatial Thinking Abilities Test (STAT), created in conjunction with the Teacher’s Guide to Modern Geography (TGMG) project of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).  Other researchers have adapted and modified this test, in Japan, and others have created new tests, in Spain, (note, the previous 2 links point directly to the download of the PDF files of the research), in Greece, in Europe, and in Canada. In what I hope is a valuable contribution to these assessment efforts, I have devised a spatial thinking assessment activity that takes advantage of the easy-to-use 3D scene viewer, part of the ArcGIS Online platform.  The lesson:  Ask students to create a new 3D scene in ArcGIS Online.  In the 3D scene, ask them to create one 3D scene "slide" for each digital oblique aerial photo that you, the instructor, supplies or points them to.  The challenge:  The student's 3D scene slide must match as closely as possible, the angle to ground, the scale, and the cardinal direction to which the aerial is aligned.  Why use oblique aerials?  Obliques provide an extra challenge and an intuitive connection to the 3D scene capabilities, though you could certainly use traditional straight-from-above imagery from ArcGIS Online or other sources as well.  If you used straight-from-above imagery, you could use ArcGIS Online, or the ArcGIS Online 3D scene viewer, or even ArcGIS Pro.  In my case I am using oblique imagery and the ArcGIS Online 3D scene viewer.  With gracious permission from my colleague Vern Whitten who owns his own aerial and outdoor photo company, Vern Whitten Photography, I am using a set of aerials that Vern flew in Minnesota and North Dakota in summer 2021, in this collection.   In the activity and assessment, the student first examines an image from the collection, below: The student then enters the latitude and longitude shown at the bottom of the image in the search box in the ArcGIS 3D Scene viewer.   The student then simultaneously examines by toggling back and forth, in separate browser tabs, the aerial and the 3D scene, adjusting the latter so it matches the former.  In a few minutes, I created the following 3D scene and captured it as a slide, shown below, for the above aerial.   For a 2 minute demonstration, see this video. For assistance on creating scenes and slides, see this documentation.   When done, students should test each slide to make certain its settings closely match each aerial as possible.  When saving, students need to pay attention to which slide they are using as the initial default view.  What is being assessed?  (1)  Skills in creating a 3D scene, part of modern GIS workflows and tools, including the use of image layers, scene navigation, slide creation, saving, and sharing.  (2)  Spatial thinking skills:   Orientation, scale, identifying ground features, elevation, horizon.  (3)  Geographic skills:  Change over space and time, natural forces acting on the landscape, human forces acting on the landscape.  (4)  Communication skills:  Consider asking your students to present their results to you and to their peers in your online or F2F class in a 5 minute presentation.  They could make use of their 3D scene above and even embed the 3D scene in a story map where they answer some of the extended questions I pose below.   (5) Self-reflection on learning.  Consider including a few questions that ask students to reflect on the content and skills they gained through this activity.   My assessment includes how close the students 3D scenes come to the (1) angle of view, (2) orientation (cardinal direction), and (3) the scale of the scene.  I avoid getting too granular in my assessment; rather, I use "they match", "they are close to matching", and "they do not match" as the rubric for each of the three measures.   For example:  I assign 3 points for each scene if the scene and the aerial match or are close to matching,  2 points if there is something (scale, tilt, direction, etc.) that is off, 1 point if there are 2 things off, and 0 points if there are more than 2 things off.  By "off" I mean that there is a difference between the 3D scene and the aerial. Example.  As an example, see this 3D scene I created of the first 15 of the 26 images in the aerial collection.  Advance through several slides so that you and your students get the idea.  You can ask students to create slides and a scene for images 16-26, or start completely over and do all 26.  Or use other aerials as I describe below. What I like about this activity and assessment.  It is replicable and extendable, as I describe below, for other areas, dates, and types of imagery.  It is able to be worked through in a short amount of time. It can be adapted for multiple ages from secondary to university level.   Younger aged students do not even need to sign in to ArcGIS Online to do this activity; they could create each slide and screen shot each of them, saving them in a Word or PowerPoint file, for example.  The assessment builds students spatial thinking and use of GIS while taking it.  It is engaging and challenging. It is fun for students to do!  In fact, Vern described his collection to me as "come fly with me", and when the students are creating slides in their 3D scene, they really do feel like they're up in the airplane with Vern!   Extending this activity.   Add additional imagery types in your 3D scene and toggle back and forth between the default basemap imagery to, say, NAIP imagery or the Clarity imagery layer.  You will notice the clarity layer as a choice to toggle on and off in the 3D scene I created, above.  Find additional imagery from aircraft, UAVs, or satellites and ask students to create 3D scenes matching those images.  Start with the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World for your imagery sources, and also look for local sources in your area, often served on ArcGIS Hub sites.  I provide further guidance in our data blog, here.  You could add even more challenge by asking students to build then-vs-now scenes using historic aerials, such as these in Iowa or these in Minneapolis (going back to the 1920s!) or even these from the spy program from the Cold War!  You could even tie another theme in with this activity, such as settlement patterns, river systems, landforms (as I wrote about recently), or others. Additional Questions.  Consider asking, discussing, and assessing these additional questions for each study area (the area covered by the current 3D scene slide), including:   Name 1 benefit of orienting your scene such that north is not at the "top".  Name 1 challenge of orienting when north is not "top".  The collection referenced in this essay contains the time and date stamp to the left of the latitude-longitude coordinates.  What time of day and what season of the year was the aerial photograph taken?  (Note:  If you are using oblique imagery without a time and date stamp, then you should still ask this question, because your students can still use clues about the direction the shadows are casting, leaves on trees, snow cover or lack of it, and so on).  Now make your best estimation on the time of day and season of the year in which the image in your 3D scene was taken.  What clues helped you determine the day and season for your 3D scene?     Name 2 differences between the imagery in the aerial vs your 3D scene.  This could be the resolution of the imagery, the extent of the aerial and the 3D scene imagery, the colors, or something else.  Be sure to specify which image type you are using in your 3D scene (default imagery, clarity imagery, or another image source). At the time of this writing (late 2021), the aerials are likely to be newer than the satellite images.  List 2 changes that you have detected in natural features (rivers, vegetation, etc) between the aerial and the satellite image.  List 2 changes that you have detected in human-built features (buildings, roads, etc) between the aerial and the satellite image. What is the predominant land use in the your study area?  Name 2 occupations that people living here could have. What do you think your study area will look like in 10 years? In 50 years?  What do you think this area looked like 50 years ago?  Why? Compare the amount of change in your study area to the amount of change in the community in which you live. Name 2 natural forces acting on your study area, and 2 human-caused forces acting on your study area. One of the aerials shows an event happening (at the fairgrounds and racetrack in Fargo).  Name 2 clues in the aerial that tell you that an event is happening.  Is an event happening in the other aerials that you are examining?  If yes, what are the clues that you can observe? Pan and zoom on your 3D scene until you find a river.  Change the base map to imagery with labels or topographic base map so you will know the name of the river.  Follow the river downstream until you find the river or lake it drains into. How can you determine which direction is upstream and which direction is downstream?   Keep following until you reach an ocean.  Which rivers and lakes did the water in your original study area drain into on its path to the ocean, and which ocean did it drain into. What, if any, major cities does the river pass through on its journey?  Name 1 reason why that city is located on the river.  Zoom back into your study area with your original imagery basemap.  Then, zoom out from your study area shown in your current 3D scene slide until you see the entire region and most of the continent.  In which state, country, and continent was the aerial photo taken?  How far is the study area from your own location?  Use the measure tool in the 3D scene viewer to find out. Ask your own question about this area.  Can you answer your own question?  It is OK if you cannot answer your own question:  Some questions need additional research to answer! Interested in developing your own geospatial thinking assessment instrument?  The community needs your contribution!  I am asked about valid and rigorous assessment tools on a weekly basis, and the literature is full of comments about the relative lack of these tools.  Besides the assessments mentioned above, another helpful framework you could use is the Structured Geospatial Analytical Method from Penn State.  It begins with asking "how can one teach the cognitive skills needed to approach geospatial analysis?"  To see this in action, examine the Learner's Guide to Geospatial Analysis.  Other useful frameworks are this geoscience habits of mind and the document that in many ways started the renewed emphasis on fostering spatial thinking through geotechnologies, the 2006 NRC report Learning to Think Spatially.  But I also encourage you to make rigorous use of web maps, 3D scenes, web mapping applications such as story maps and dashboards, spatial analysis tools, and other capabilities in the ArcGIS platform to foster spatial and critical thinking.  In so doing, I am sure you will think of many creative ways to assess your students' work.  ... 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What did you do for GIS Day 2021?  On GIS Day, the global community helps others learn about geography and the real-world applications of GIS that are making a difference in our society. It is an opportunity for people to share their accomplishments and inspire others to discover and use GIS. I had a very "spatial" time presenting many times during the week to a wide variety of audiences from all over the world.  I hope you had a wonderful day and week presenting and participating in events.  In this article I highlight just a few of the 1,500 inspiring events from around the world (see this web map to learn more about each event and the global distribution) and the visionary people and the visionary people in the GIS community who made those events happen.   These events were hosted by libraries, museums, private companies, universities, colleges, schools, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, from people spanning a wide diversity of disciplines--literally from agriculture to zoology.  Feel free to comment below about the events that you hosted or participated in!  GIS does not "end" after GIS Day ends!  The resources developed for GIS Day can be used throughout the year!  The resources on the GIS Day site include some Digital Celebration [gisday.com] content as well as a new Digital Swag Bag [gisday.com], that contains digital downloads, coloring pages, games and activities, plus links to download the new GIS Day mobile app. One of the largest events spanned multiple days, and thus was dubbed GIS Week!   This virtual event was hosted by the Unviersity of California system and they found ArcGIS Hub was the perfect technology to host it.  Many of my Esri colleagues and I conducted workshops and presentations at this event:  My workshop focused on connecting maps, story maps, dashboards, and Survey123; David Yu's featured Deep Learning in ArcGIS; Lucy Guerra's featured enhancing the user experience with quality data.  We were joined with workshops from some truly wonderful students, faculty, and GIS professionals.   Another multi-day event was hosted by Western Libraries in Canada, where they used an ArcGIS dashboard to track speakers and activities.   Another multi-day event was Texas GIS Day, where my colleague Lisa Berry gave the keynote, I gave a workshop for educators after hearing how they are using GIS in innovative ways in their instruction, and dozens of others shared their knowledge.   GIS Week ArcGIS Hub from the University of California system.  GIS Days Dashboard from Western Libraries in Canada. Several GIS Day events this year were live webcasts.  My Esri commercial team colleague Cindy Elliott was joined by Sean Crotty, professor at Texas Christian University, Liz Parrish from HEB, and Matt Patyk of Dunaway.  They discussed how GIS cutting-edge technology cuts across all businesses and areas of practice to help make better decisions and solve complex challenges.  The recording is archived here on LinkedIn.   I conducted my 2nd annual live webcast focused on education, including how and why to teach GIS from primary to university settings and in a wide variety of disciplines.  This webcast, entitled Maps, Music, and More, was conducted via Facebook Live, and it is archived in 4 segments, beginning here and as a story map, here.   Plus, this video of "Globie" baking an Earth cake was popular! I was invited to participate in a large combination face-to-face-and-online GIS Day event hosted by Centurion University in India.  The event featured speakers, posters, and networking (see below). Centurion University's GIS Day event.  I gave a presentation for the GIS and education community in Bulgaria.  My colleague in education from Esri Bulgaria also presented, along with other GIS professionals, teachers and professors, and over 200 students.  In Bulgaria, over 10,000 students and more than 1,000 teachers have ArcGIS Online accounts. Here is a a Dashboard thtat is updated every few days showing the extent to which GIS is used in the country, and an Educational Hub, along with the winners. of their mapping competition.  The program for the GIS Day event in Bulgaria.  Other GIS Day events included Kenyatta University in Kenya, where the theme was GIS in research and tourism management, a drones saving lives presentation in Sweden, a "OpenGeoData to Web GIS Applications" presentation from the African Association for Geospatial (AGEOS) in Tunisia, many events for teachers, including one hosted for Hawaii educators by Learning Endeavors, the Spatial Information and Cartography Commission in Australia, and a presentation at the University of Minnesota, featuring Dr Michelle LaRue in this year's Borchert lecture, "From cougars to penguins:  Pushing boundaries in spatial ecology." GIS Day events in Guatemala and Jamaica.  I gave a workshop for the Jamaica community's event because of my work on walkability and GIS. To see people applying spatial thinking and geotechnologies to make the world a safer, more resilient, healthier, more equitable, more sustainable place really warms the "geo-heartstrings".  If you are curious about GIS, I invite you to use the resources in this Esri Community space to learn more about it.  If you are already using GIS, every day is GIS Day (see this video for why this is so), and I salute your work and your vision.  You are making a positive difference in our world! --Joseph Kerski   ... View more