Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

I created this story map that takes advantage of the new map actions capabilities to illustrate the educational possibilities of map actions. Map actions allow for something to happen as the user interacts with your story map.  In this case, the user is guided through a series of landforms in a geomorphology investigation, but I encourage you to consider other themes and topics, and the maps and images that could support those topics, that you are seeking to teach with using these same techniques.  In the story map, I provide the 2D map and 3D scene that supports the landforms investigation and quiz for further exploration, as well as a link to guidelines for creating the map actions.   I chose geomorphology for this example for several key reasons:  First, geomorphology touches on human-environment interaction and can be used to effectively teach about change over time, how the landscape influences humans (settlement patterns, land use) and how humans influence landscapes (direct and indirect modification).  Those of you who have known me for years probably remember when I worked at USGS, I used to carry around an enormous roll of 100 paper topographic maps held together by some massive rubber bands to teach these same concepts.  Second, using these digital USGS topographic maps (one of the basemaps that you can access in ArcGIS Online) in a story map is much more versatile (and lighter to "carry"!) than being tied to those paper maps.  In addition, students and faculty can change their scale, add data to them (such as land cover, precipitation patterns, population density, and more), and perform analysis on them (such as create watersheds, trace downstream, and calculate viewshed).   JosephKerski_0-1637338623266.jpeg   Story map with map action on an educational theme (geomorphology).  A section of the story map referenced above using map actions.  The scale and location change, in this story map, when the map user clicks on the boxes above or elsewhere in the map, strings of text. I look forward to your comments below! ... View more

I created this story map that takes advantage of the new map actions capabilities to illustrate the educational possibilities of map actions.  Map actions allow for something to happen as the user interacts with your story map.  In this case, the user is guided through a series of landforms in a geomorphology investigation, but I encourage you to consider other themes and topics, and the maps and images that could support those topics, that you are seeking to teach with using these same techniques.  In the story map, I provide the 2D map and 3D scene that supports the landforms investigation and quiz for further exploration, as well as a link to guidelines for creating the map actions.     I chose geomorphology for this example for several key reasons:  First, geomorphology touches on human-environment interaction and can be used to effectively teach about change over time, how the landscape influences humans (settlement patterns, land use) and how humans influence landscapes (direct and indirect modification).  Those of you who have known me for years probably remember when I worked at USGS, I used to carry around an enormous roll of 100 paper topographic maps held together by some massive rubber bands to teach these same concepts.  Second, using these digital USGS topographic maps (one of the basemaps that you can access in ArcGIS Online) in a story map is much more versatile (and lighter to "carry"!) than being tied to those paper maps.  In addition, students and faculty can change their scale, add data to them (such as land cover, precipitation patterns, population density, and more), and perform analysis on them (such as create watersheds, trace downstream, and calculate viewshed).         Story map with map action on an educational theme (geomorphology).A section of the story map referenced above using map actions.  The scale and location change, in this story map, when the map user clicks on the boxes above or elsewhere in the map, strings of text. I look forward to your comments below! ... View more

A set of 3 recent articles explores the most important skills, benefits, and strategies in teaching with GIS:   JosephKerski_1-1633553384642.png 1)  What are the 10 most important GIS skills to nurture in teaching GIS? JosephKerski_0-1633553356593.png   2)  What are the 10 most important educational benefits that GIS fosters? JosephKerski_3-1633553475372.png 3)  What are 10 Key Strategies for Teaching GIS? I trust these skills, benefits, and strategies will be useful as you reflect upon your own instruction and plan for the future.  Consider using these points as advocacy tools for why you are keen on teaching with GIS as you interact with fellow faculty, deans, and others at your colleges, universities, or schools.   This essay is also provided here as a video. Feel free to comment below on the following:  What skill, benefit, or strategy have you found particularly useful?  Which have been left off the list that you feel should be included?  ... View more

I recently wrote about 10 GIS skills that if students become confident with, they can do most anything in a GIS environment.  I followed that with an essay describing 10 educational benefits resulting from teaching with GIS.  In this essay, and in this video, let's examine 10 key strategies for teaching GIS in an effective manner that engages students.   By "strategies" I mean approaches that are suitable for any GIS course from beginning to advanced.  I also believe these approaches are suitable to the use of GIS as an instructional tool in history, geography, environmental science, criminal justice, data science, business, health, sociology, biology, and in many other courses across higher education.   I have successfully tested these approaches in my own courses and I know many instructors who pursue these approaches with success as well.  JosephKerski_10-1633446271467.png  1.  Make it anchored to your program goals.  You are not teaching GIS so that students will simply become more proficient with a certain set of tools in a certain version of software.  You are fostering critical thinking, data fluency, spatial thinking, communication skills, connection to the community, proficiency in field methods, and so much more.  Yes, GIS skills are important, but maps are a means to an end. "Putting your data on a map" is not the end point, but rather the beginning.  The higher goal is not to make a map, but to understand something better, in a deeper, richer, way, and then to perhaps take action on it.  GIS in the hands of students builds skills in asking good questions and scientific inquiry, emboldening them to become change agents in society when they focus on issues that they care about.  Carefully examine the goals of the program within which your courses are located:  How can teaching about GIS or teaching with GIS help you achieve those goals?  How can those goals be articulated into course learning objectives?  How can you use and structure readings, videos, discussion, hands-on activities, assessments, and other items (see example in this online course) so that students will learn the content, skills, and perspectives that you are seeking?   JosephKerski_4-1633445996704.png  2.  Make it holistic.   By its very nature, the geographic perspective through GIS fosters the consideration of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and anthrosphere as a complex, interacting "system of systems".   You cannot model or understand the world in all of its complexity in any single lesson or even a single course or program.   People spend their entire careers trying to understand even specific small aspects of the Earth system.  However, you can ensure that your course elements remind students to consider the "bigger picture".  This includes how decisions in one sphere are never isolated--they cause ripple effects, positive and negative, in the other spheres.  With the themes-as-layers structure of geodatabases, the ability to create multivariate maps, and the ability to visualize themes across 3D scenes and across time periods through swipe and animation tools, you can foster the holistic view even if you have a weekly theme such as "water" or "hazards."  This is possible in part because of the interconnections between natural systems and human-built systems, and GIS can help students understand patterns, relationships, and trends.  Furthermore, by varying the themes that you study, (see strategy #6 below), students will emerge from your courses with a sense that "everything is spatial" and is interconnected.    JosephKerski_5-1633446043305.png 3.  Make it focused.  Focus each week or another period of time (two weeks, a month, etc.) on a problem in one sector of society.  There is no sector where you cannot find data or devise real-world problems around:   Crime, energy, water, historic or sacred structures, biodiversity, land use, landforms, climate, weather, urban forms, natural hazards, social, racial, and economic inequalities, land use, agriculture, transportation, utilities, supply chain management, and a host of others.  Focusing sections of courses, and the accompanying readings, videos, discussions, and hands-on activities, builds content knowledge around a specific subject or knowledge domain.  Doing so also, over time, helps students realize that GIS and the spatial perspective are relevant to every 21st Century problem we face.    Doesn't this focused advice conflict with the previous strategy and advice about considering problems holistically?  No, because in your courses, you can include thought-provoking questions to students in online discussion boards, face to face conversations, and quizzes that "go beyond" the lesson.  For example, in one of my lessons on siting a business using GIS,  I include the question, "If you were really doing this site selection as a consultant for this specific convenience store chain, outside of this course, what other data and themes would you consider?"  In my activity, the students use traffic volume, demographic characteristics, consumer preferences (with fuel, gas, and lottery tickets figuring prominently in convenience stores), and drive times to competitors to determine the ideal location for a convenience store in a metropolitan area.  But this question helps them to consider variables that we did not have time to consider in class, such as zoning, left turns vs. right turns, major centers of employment, commuting patterns, and others.    I ask similar types of questions after other activities: "If you were really doing this study as a consultant, what variables, themes, and other considerations would you pursue?"   These and similar questions encourage them to think about other aspects of the physical or cultural environment and thus that the world is a complex place with variables that change over space and over time, and that are connected.  It also reminds students that in their own future workplace, time, budget, and staffing constraints will always force problems to be dealt with by simplifying them at least in some way.   There is never enough time to consider every single variable or contingency--that is the reality of the world in which we live and the organizations in which we work.  But GIS gives us the best hope we have of considering at least most of the key considerations and ramifications.    JosephKerski_2-1633445624191.png 4.  Make it multiscale.  Almost all pressing, relevant issues in our world, from natural hazards to health to education, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals, as well as others, are global in nature and foster planet-scale investigation.  But I encourage you to make some of your lessons and activities focused on your own community and region.  Students will have more knowledge about, and, indeed, through GIS you can help foster, vested interest in what is occurring in their own area.  Often times, students have never been asked what they care about in their local community!  They may feel as if they do not have a voice!  Thus, your course(s) is an opportunity for them to start investigating, and start caring. It could a skateboard park, urban greenway, farmers markets, historical districts, dangerous intersections, equity, access, or many other issues.  Many of the existing and readily accessible lessons for example in the ArcGIS Learn Library can be modified for your own area, given the rapid expansion of open data portals such as ArcGIS Hub sites.  And if the students are studying remotely, with your prompting, they can transfer this local knowledge to "how is my own community dealing with <floods> <crime> <clogged transportation arterials>?   JosephKerski_13-1633447460001.png5.  Make it varied and interesting!  My most "cringeworthy" moments come occasionally when people meet me and say, "Oh, Joseph you're in GIS?  I took a GIS course!  It was the most boring thing ever."   I grimace when I hear this, and you are probably doing the same while reading this or watching the video.  But then I think about those chemistry, statistics, and other courses I took as a secondary and university student that I truly disliked.  Even though the subject matter was at times fascinating, I dreaded the courses and still have bad memories about them.  How can this be?  It could be the approach, text, methods, or instructor, or even something else going on in our lives right then.  Despite the plethora of ways people learn nowadays, including your own students, you still have a great deal of influence on their engagement of the topic.  If you are interested in exploring the world through GIS, and you demonstrate this interest, in your own teaching style but also in the activities you include in your course, chances are, most students will be as well.  By varying the instructional methods you use, including online discussion boards, assessment items including having students present their research results using story maps and other tools, hybrid and face to face meetings, embed the maps in videos or dashboards, use Kahoot and other interactive quiz tools, mixing video and audio, group vs. individual projects, your courses will remain lively and fresh.  And even though your courses are "not just about the tools", if you ask your students from time to time to check out a new map (such as this hats around the world map) or visualization (such as this periodic table of spatial analysis), or a new GIS tool (such as the blending tools in ArcGIS Online or the Mars 3D viewer), your courses will be anything but boring.  Humans, after all, do love to tinker with tools.  JosephKerski_11-1633447415934.png6.  Make it relevant.  With local to global issues all around us, this strategy is probably the easiest strategy of all to incorporate.   Selecting a current event and creating a mini-lesson out of it, even for only 15 minutes weekly in class, is a powerful way of stoking interest and to keep any geospatial-related course timely and relevant.  One of the techniques we often modeled in our annual T3G (Teachers Teaching Teachers) GIS institutes was "GeoNews" where a team of 2 would show how to effectively teach a topic currently in the news using GIS.  This "show and tell" was styled after a newscast with anchorpersons.  I vividly remember those sessions in the T3G institutes that demonstrated teaching about tropical storms, train derailments, political instability, wildfires, a new urban greenway, and many other topics.   Truly there was never a shortage of topics to illustrate how mapping tools could be used to inform others about the topics and why they were relevant.  Certainly, story maps, dashboards, charts, and infographics available with the ArcGIS platform come to mind as suitable tools.  In addition, examining current wildfire perimeters, streamflow, weather, and current demographics or consumer preferences from the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World make for discussions and activities that are easily implemented with minimal preparation time.  These Living Atlas layers and maps can be accessed with a click of a mouse or touchpad, providing instant springboards for discussion.   JosephKerski_9-1633446199565.png  7.  Make it field-based.  GIS is inherently tied to space and place.  I implore you to keep fieldwork alive in all of your courses.  Working with maps, satellite imagery, and visualizations can help foster "topophilia", geographer Yi-Fu Tuan's term for the love of place.  In tandem with these data sets and GIS tools, students must be immersed in these spaces, using all 5 of their senses.  Therefore, include activities where students collect, map, and analyze something in the field, whether it is in the physical or cultural environment.  This could be invasive plant species, light poles or other infrastructure, tree species-height-and-condition, or other themes.  Consider including something that changes often, such as noise, pedestrian or vehicle counts, or weather, so that you can easily compare it as you collect in different places and over different times of day or seasons.   Consider collecting the same themes each semester so you can build a long-term database of phenomena.  Even if your college or university does not have an established field study center, field work just on your own campus is equally valuable.  Some campuses have an arboretum, but if not, anyplace on campus would work just fine.  If your courses are all virtual and nobody is on campus right now, that's also no problem:  Field work in the students’ own neighborhoods, wherever they happen to be, is quite doable using ArcGIS Field Maps, Survey123, QuickCapture, and other tools such as PictureThisAI or iNaturalist. And if you have international students collecting data, which I know many of you have, it will be fascinating to compare housing types, plant species, weather, and other variables across countries and continents.  JosephKerski_7-1633446111076.png 8.  Make it multi-level.  One exciting aspect to teaching with modern GIS tools is that they all offer multiple levels of engagement.  For example, using the Wayback imagery web mapping application in swipe mode to compare land cover change is an excellent way to foster analysis of change-over-space-and-time and using web mapping applications.  There is no sign-in required with this and other similar tools, and no analysis tools to run.  With the Wayback imagery, students are visually comparing the differences across 7 years in urbanization, glacial extent, forest cover, urban extent, coastal erosion, or some other Earth theme in a Level I introductory (but powerful) Level I mode.  But in a Level II mode, students can save the layers covering 1 of those themes and use them in ArcGIS Online with one of the small but powerful spatial analysis tools.  In a Level III mode, students can use some of the image classification tools in ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Pro to calculate changes on the landscape in 2D or 3D.  This Level I, II, and III (or more) approach is almost always possible using geotechnological tools.  I encourage you also when designing your courses to keep coming back to Level I, for example, when introducing a new topic.  Just because Level II and III exists does not mean Level I techniques are not compelling and valid.    JosephKerski_14-1633447486884.png 9.  Make it so students can shine, explore, and grow.  Ask them to reflect upon their learning with questions, even in your quizzes, such as "What is the most valuable thing you learned this week?  What was the most frustrating thing about this week in class?  What is 1 thing that you read about this week that you would like to learn more about?"  Often, students are not accustomed to being asked to reflect on their own learning, which I feel is a tragedy and must be changed.  Thus, your encouragement in this area will help them become more reflective learners.   For more ideas on this topic, see one of my favorite books on this topic, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield. Include assignments where students create story maps and other web mapping applications (such as custom tools they build with Web App Builder or Experience Builder), and where they share results in these applications.  Students can share them with you as their instructor via a URL, and they can also share with their peers.  Students can also use these apps in an online or face-to-face presentations to you and their classmates, or even with external stakeholders.  These story maps can also extend beyond your course or program and become a key part of the students' professional portfolio that they take into the workplace.    JosephKerski_8-1633446158760.png 10.  Make it visionary.  Include topics such as space-time cube mapping, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the blurring of the lines between mapping and visualizations, 3D analytics, the meshing of BIM, CAD, and GIS tools for inside-building and outside mapping and analysis, coding and Jupyter Notebooks, virtual reality, and other cutting-edge GIS trends and capabilities in your course.  Again, not just because these tools exist, but to affirm the notion that the tools are rapidly evolving, and to cement the idea for students that they need to be lifelong learners (as you also are, as their instructor!)  Don't just include tools, though:  Include podcasts and video interviews with visionary people, such as through the Esri Virtual Job Shadow videos and the GeoInspirations series at Directions Magazine.  Keep the students ever-thinking about the many ways they can make a contribution to society through GIS, such as through regularly purusing this list from Esri of industries where GIS is used.  Perhaps most importantly, keep the higher, more noble goals in mind:  Using GIS is ultimately about building a better world.   You and your students have a key role to play in that world!    JosephKerski_12-1633447438829.pngTeaching modern GIS tools and approaches enriches GIScience programs but also many other disciplines across higher education.  Try these strategies in your own courses, and I look forward to your comments below.     ... 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A memorial to honor those lost to COVID-19 in which GIS played a big role is happening now in Washington DC.  Last week, 650,000 flags were planted on the National Mall in Washington to represent those lost to the COVID pandemic.  People that have lost someone dear to them can dedicate a flag with a personalized message on the website.  Volunteers then create the flags and use ArcGIS Survey123 to locate and take a picture of the flags with a notification sent to the family.  See the flags and messages here: https://www.inamericaflags.org/  inamerica_flags.JPG I was so impressed by this project that I created a video:  https://youtu.be/OfAqoUq-JjA  about this so you can learn more and share it with your students, fellow faculty, and friends and families.  I also salute the artist behind this project, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg.  If you have lost someone to the pandemic, below the map on the In America Flags site is a Survey123 form where you can dedicate a flag.  Submissions for flags are accepted until 30 September 2021 and the exhibit lasts until 3 October 2021.  In addition, people who fill out the form can optionally add a picture and their loved ones will appear on the COVID Lost Loved Ones map.  Zoom around and click on some of the pictures to see the touching and personal stories of the many who have been lost (too many!).   inamerica_flags2.JPG This exhibit is important to so many families who have provided emotional gratitude for this work.  Many of the victims did not have proper funerals nor did their families have a chance to grieve.  Some families are traveling out to Washington DC to help honor their loved ones for this exhibit, or have expressed thanks for this recognition.  For the longer term, this data will be stored digitally by the Smithsonian Institution.     Many volunteers stepped in to make this all happen:  Most of the on-site volunteer work and initial website done by George Washington University Anthropology dept and some assistance from some Esri folks including the health and human services team, and GISCorps.   One of many press articles from the launch yesterday: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/670-000-flags-on-the-national-mall-pay-tribute-to-america-s-devastating-covid-19-losses/ar-AAOyNt1?ocid=BingNewsSearch   Follow for updates: https://twitter.com/inamericaflags https://www.facebook.com/inamericaflags   Once again, this is a keen reminder, of how GIS can help us tell stories, connect with what we have and … what we have lost. ... View more

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/4ac3784538064850bcea91ae588e6392  is a story map that I just revised, with messages on thinking about audience, to hands-on portions where you build your own story maps.  I do hope it is useful. --Joseph Kerski  ... View more

Here are some tips and guidance that I hope will be helpful in the area of mentoring and geomentoring:    https://geo-jobe.com/mapthis/geomentoring-strategies/    --Joseph Kerski  ... View more

Greetings all:   I have been interviewing people in the geospatial field from all over the world in nonprofits, business, academia, and government agencies; perhaps it will spark some career inspirations as you journey forward:     https://www.directionsmag.com/playlist/6651   --Joseph Kerski  ... View more

All:   I thought this group might like to read this and try this: https://community.esri.com/t5/education-blog/touch-the-future-integrating-augmented-reality/ba-p/1051038 Touch the Future: Integrating Augmented Reality with Field Work, GIS, and Argis Solutions   --Joseph Kerski ... View more

Many of us have encountered the following question from students: “What should I do for my GIS project?” Or, perhaps you are that student looking for a GIS project. While the best project is the one that students come up with themselves, sometimes, suggestions are helpful to get started. See my recently updated guidelines here.  I look forward to your comments! ... View more

Recently I wrote an essay about the 10 most important GIS skills that working with ArcGIS Online fosters.  These include creating expressions, symbolizing and classifying, performing spatial analysis, and others.  However, as important as GIS skills are, working with GIS fosters far more benefits in education.  Furthermore, GIS is not "just maps" - maps help us understand patterns, relationships, and trends, but mapping is not the end goal:  Rather, understanding is the end goal.  Understanding something in a deeper, richer, more holistic way, and the smarter decisions and action that can result from that understanding.  As Richard Saul Wurman said, "Understanding precedes action."  In this essay and in this video, I explore what I consider to be the 10 most important educational benefits that working with GIS fosters, starting with spatial thinking.  I look forward to your feedback. The Top 10 Educational Benefits to Working with GIS  graphic_dashboard.png (1)  Spatial Thinking.  Maps have always been appealing; they convey a large amount of information in a small amount of space. In the past, this space was always constrained by physical media--stone tablets, wood blocks, silver plates (yes, silver!), film, and paper.  Today's digital maps are all around us, and increasingly embedded in dashboards, story maps, articles, video, and multimedia of all types.  They are in 2D and 3D representations, with the fourth dimension of time increasingly enabled through such techniques as animations and space-time cubes.  Spatial thinking is key to understanding our increasingly interconnected, complex world, and key to solving the serious problems we are facing in that world.  Spatial thinking is greatly enabled by interacting with interactive maps made possible through GIS.   Through GIS, students are not only consuming maps created by others, but they are creating their own maps, infographics, and web mapping applications, and therefore are deeply connecting with the creative process.  Learning to think spatially, sometimes called graphicacy, is every bit as important to teach at all levels in education as numeracy, articulacy, and literacy, as educators and scholars have argued as long ago as 1971.   Spatial thinking is coupled with holistic thinking--considering the world as more than just the sum of its parts.  It is also connected to seeing the world as a system of systems--the biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and anthrosphere--the human sphere.  Spatial thinking also fosters the understanding of important Earth cycles such as the carbon cycle and the hydrologic cycle.  JosephKerski_0-1630426196487.png (2)  Critical Thinking.  Critical thinking I believe must include three aspects:  (2a) Critical thinking about data.  (2b)  Critical thinking about methods.  (2c).  Critical thinking about maps.   Questions to pose as you teach with GIS include:   What difference would changing the data set theme, resolution, time, or scale make in the final analysis?  What difference would changing the data set source to one collected by a different organization?  What difference would changing the Arcade expression make in the appearance of this map, and why?  What difference would an erase rather than a union function make in the final sites we are considering, and why?  Can you trust this map to make a decision with?  Is this map or layer suitable for your project?  Can you trust the data that you yourself collected in the field?  What are the inherent errors in data, from map projections to missing attributes, and how can you manage this error? graphic_pbl.jpeg(3)  Problem-based Learning (PBL).   GIS was created to solve problems.  Using GIS in education helps students frame, visualize, and grapple with problems.  It even enables students to create solutions to those problems, whether it is about natural hazards, climate, urban greenways, litter, energy, social inequity, or the other complex issues of our day.  PBL implies active learning, and GIS is a natural fit because when using GIS, student are actively engaged as scientists, planners, and other professional decision makers.  Students are not just learning about climate or population, they are doing climate and population analysis.  Students in PBL learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.   Using GIS, students have flexibility to choose projects and problems that they see in their community and their world that are serious and need addressing.   graphic_inquiry.jpeg (4)  Geographic and Scientific Inquiry.  Inquiry involves asking questions, gathering data, assessing the quality of that data, evaluating methods, analyzing the data and the results of the methods used, making decisions and recommendations, and taking action.  This process usually sparks additional questions, and the process continues.  The effective use of GIS is keenly tied to this process of inquiry.  At its core, GIS has always been "a thinkers tool" as I and Charlie Fitzpatrick have often written and said.  GIS requires students to ask questions.  To be honest, students aren't used to asking their own questions; they are really most used to instructors asking them questions.  How can we encourage students to ask thoughtful questions of their own?  A good map teaches you to ask a better question, as my colleague at Esri Charlie Frye has said, and as I explain here.  Asking questions leads to tenacity in problem solving, and those who ask questions are those who employers want to hire to improve the efficiency of their workplace and help their organization to meet its mission.  graphic_table.jpeg (5)  Data Fluency.   In this essay, I made the case based on Jukes et al.'s book Understanding the Digital Generation that using GIS fosters data fluency.  The book's authors prefer the word "fluency" over literacy because it conveys a sense of lifelong learning, such as becoming fluent in a language--in this case, the language of technology.  There are five important fluencies:  (1) Solution fluency:  Whole brain thinking, including creativity and problem solving applied in real time.  (2)  Information fluency:  The ability to access digital information sources to retrieve desired information and assess and critically evaluate the quality of information.  (3)  Collaboration fluency:   This "teamworking proficiency" is the "ability to work cooperatively with virtual and real partners in an online environment to create original digital products."  (4)  Creativity fluency:  The "process by which artistic proficiency adds meaning through design, art, and storytelling."  (5)  Media fluency:  The ability to look analytically at any communication media to interpret the real message, determine how the chosen media is being used to shape thinking, evaluate the efficacy of the message, and the ability to publish original digital products to match the media to the intended message.   Space does not permit me to make all of the connections between these fluencies and what students do when they use GIS and geographic inquiry to grapple with problems.  However, I have witnessed thousands of times over the past 20 years that students doing so engage in all five of these fluencies.   The creating of story maps alone is key to creative fluency (#4), and thinking critically about maps is key to success with #5 and indeed, success in many aspects of modern life.  graphic_community.jpeg (6)  Community Connections.   GIS is a tool used globally and on global problems such as climate, education, water, and other United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but it is at the same time it is a tool that students and educators can use to engage with issues at the local level, such as planning a new bike trail, nurturing public art or community gardens, or tackling traffic accidents or graffiti.  With the rise of community data portals such as ArcGIS Hub, and indicators in real time of what is happening on, under, and over the planet, and students' ability to collect their own data, there is no shortage of data to examine, map, and use in understanding and engaging with local issues.  graphic_uav.jpeg  (7)  Field work.   I contend that field work needs to include (A) field methods, and (B) getting outside!  Field work is essential not only understanding our changing world, and our communities, but is essential for nurturing an "Earth Ethic" in students, so that they will appreciate, and want to care for, the marvelous planet on which we live.  Successful field work involves planning, executing, and analyzing results.  It is keenly tied to project planning, dealing with uncertainty, working with high-tech and low tech methods, and dealing with data--the units that will be used, the variables, and the resulting data tables, images, geodatabases, and maps.  It often involves contacting others in the community for access to certain lands or to garner their support and participation.  Survey123 or other Esri GIS apps can be used, but students can also use other citizen science apps such as iNaturalist, phone apps for noise or plant species, and bring the data into the ArcGIS environment for spatial analysis.  Field work was an integral part, for example, of a Data Citizens project I was involved in, where students and faculty mapped storm drains and learned about the water and sewage system of their own community.  Field work, even if it is just on the school or university campus, involves the act of getting outside and observing, both with tech tools but also with one's own five senses.  It is also a key part in overcoming "nature deficit disorder" as explained by Richard Louv in his groundbreaking book Last Child in the Woods.  graphic_building.jpeg (8) Career Pathways.  "Are we ever going to use this after we get out of school?" is an oft-heard phrase articulated by students.  While we shouldn't use GIS in education "just because" it is in demand in the workplace, GIS does provide students with key career skills that will never "go out of style."  Why?  In part because students who use GIS become valuable employees for nonprofit, academia, local-to-international government agencies, and private industry.  They are able to make decisions, work with data, and see things holistically.  The "Whys of Where" will be increasingly asked in all aspects of the workforce in the coming years.  We are faced with ever-increasing pressures on this, our own planet, for which there is no spare.  Sustainability and resilience will be in every organization's plan in the future, and GIS will always have a key role.  Furthermore I have seen time and time again how students' own professional behavior "rises up" in professionalism because they know they are using a set of tools that are being used in the professional community.   See the career videos here and listen to these podcasts I have created for dozens of intriguing people using GIS in their day to day work. graphic_content_knowl.jpeg (9)  Content Knowledge.  For years I and my teammates have argued that when you are teaching and learning with GIS, you are learning core content knowledge.   GIS was never about "buttonology" -- memorizing where tools and buttons are on the GIS interface and learning how to use them.   Even if you are teaching and learning in a GIS or GIScience course, every procedure has real data behind it, and so you are concurrently studying plate tectonics, ecoregions, climate, the hydrologic network, transportation, energy, city zoning, or many other aspects of our natural and human-built world.  GIS is core to science, social science, and many other fields.  And GIS is rapidly expanding to fields outside geography, GIS, and planning, such as health, business, civil engineering, data science, history, humanities, and many others.  Those fields use their own data, approaches, and problems, and students in those fields are learning about cause-and-effect, and human-environment interactions upon health, supply chain management, building energy efficiency, and a myriad of other topics in those disciplines.  In both of these "teaching GIS" and "teaching with GIS" categories, I would argue that content knowledge is acquired more rapidly than memorizing large volumes of information, because students are actively engaging with the data and methods as a practicing professional would in those fields. graphic_changeagent2.jpeg (10)  Students as Change Agents.   Students empowered with the skills, content knowledge, and perspectives detailed in this and the previous essay have the confidence and ability to become change agents in their future workplace.  I would also argue that given the examples detailed in the Esri community space over the years, such as here at a high school and here at the community college, that students are already change agents in their own school and university, and beyond.  GIS can also serve to help young women and other underrepresented populations step into technology-based careers.  Educators from primary to university level as well as those in informal educational settings such as museums and 4H and other after-school programs love using GIS because it embodies why they all got into education in the first place--making a positive difference in the world through caring, engaged students.   Which of these 10 benefits have you personally witnessed when teaching or learning GIS?  Which of the 10 do you think will be most important during the remainder of this decade?  What benefit have I left off this list?  I invite your comments below.    ... 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