Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

The Partnership for 21st Century Learning, P21, has teamed with the Pearson Foundation to capture and share exemplary 21st century learning practices that are improving schools, student learning and opportunities in classrooms and communities across the United States. In addition to identifying, documenting, sharing and celebrating the 21st century practices of exemplar schools, they report on the broader common features– the Patterns of Innovation– that emerge across exemplar schools and appear to be at the heart of their effective transformation into 21st Century Learning Environments. The 5 essential ingredients that P21 has thus far identified as contributing to exemplar schools' success are: Student Voice Engaged Community Distributed Leadership Climate of Achievement Evidence & Research Besides being able to search the exemplar schools, one can search by state, educational level, and topic (such as professional development or technology). I could not help but notice that many characteristics of these exemplar schools are evident in schools where GIS is being used by educators and students, and where GIS is supported by the school and district administration.  For example, take a look at some of these videos of students who use GIS in their educational journey from primary school to university level:  The "student voice" mentioned by P21 is evident in each story told.  Explore why and how students are using GIS in education, and dig into some of the case studies of real students, faculty, and administrators doing real work with GIS.  These represent the "engaged community" identified by P21. As my colleagues and I have written in this blog and elsewhere for many years, it's not just the technology that has merit--it is the critical thinking, community connections, career pathways, media fluency, holistic thinking, and problem-based learning that is fostered when students engage in geotechnologies.  In short, GIS fosters the P21 tenet of the "climate of achievement."  In the past, my colleagues and I wrote the Geography Skills map for P21, which draws further connections between P21 goals and GIS. Finally, touching on the P21's identification of  "evidence and research", see the GIS education bibliography for studies measuring student achievement, educator professional development, and more. Using Geographic Information Systems in Education. ... View more

.. in education via http://www.ncge.org/webinars 6pm / 1800 Mountain Time. The presentation if you are not able to join us live, is here: http://education.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=ebfe7296f03e4f198494a8e8819a4453 --Joseph Kerski ... View more

Something that Esri founder and president Jack Dangermond said this summer at one of the Young Professionals Network panel sessions at the Esri User Conference this past summer has stuck with me ever since: Jack said that he is "desperately learning." It was the first time I had heard this adverb applied to learning and I liked it immediately. I think it typifies the attitude of those involved with GIS in education, and one that we need to cultivate in our students.  I believe it has several key implications, as I describe below and in this video. The adverb implies that learning is lifelong. GIS technology is rapidly changing, with citizen science tools, users as data publishers, mobile applications, open data, 3D tools, and the evolution of GIS to the web to name a few. The application areas for GIS are rapidly expanding, as is the audience for communicating the results of GIS analysis and the means available for communicating one's GIS story. But more than that, "desperately learning" implies that learning takes effort. Learning takes hard work; it takes initiative; it requires challenging oneself to try new methods and tools. It requires listening and continually asking questions. Finally, "desperately learning" implies that learning is imperative. It is not an option. Given the complex and vexing challenges our world is facing, we cannot be complacent in our work in education and GIS. Indeed, the world needs the contribution of all of us involved with grappling with issues of water, energy, human health, crime, land use, urban planning, natural hazards, and other issues that GIS can be of great utility in understanding, modeling, and solving.  As my colleague Charlie Fitzpatrick wrote recently, we need to be learning quickly--there's no time to lose. Are you "desperately learning?" How are you fostering this attitude in your students? Are you "Desperately Learning"? There's no time to lose--the world needs your contribution. ... View more

Recently I posted a document that I have been curating for quite a few years now, one explaining why GIS in education matters.  This content is also posted with graphics on the Esri Insider newsletter.  To provide another way of communicating this information, I have created a series of videos on this same theme, in three parts--Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. The reasons why GIS in education matters include critical thinking, career pathways, spatial thinking, understanding how to work with data and the limitations of data, building media fluency, focusing on the whys of where, asking good questions, solving problems, sustainability and green technology, and understanding changes over space and time. I am interested in your reactions to these videos:  What is missing from this message? What is useful about these videos?  In what settings could you use them in your own work with fellow faculty, with faculty from other disciplines, with administrators, with parents, and with students?  What do you include in your own messages about the reasons for GIS in education? Why GIS in Education: Series of videos. ... View more

We write frequently in this blog about educating students and professional development for educators.  But, could the general public also benefit from GIS education?  I contend that not only can the general public benefit, but it is part of our responsibility as GIS professionals to seek out opportunities to do so.  And, when we find an opportunity, what are some tried-and-tested strategies for educating the general public about GIS?   In this essay I present 20 ideas that I have used in many different venues for general-public GIS outreach, and I would like to hear about your ideas and strategies as well. 1.  Sometimes, a one page information sheet about "Why GIS in education (and society) matters" is what is needed.  Here is my document on this theme. 2.   You may have the opportunity to teach a workshop or a short course for the general public.  I recently taught a course for the general public and titled it, "Why Maps Still Matter", at the University of Denver. 3.  Need an example of an elevator speech?  I have a series of them, filmed in actual elevators, here. 4.   I created a series of "Why geography matters" videos in this playlist. 5.  Events such as the one I describe here at a local history museum are sometimes effective ways.   Note that “G-Harmony” was the message here! 6.  Geocaching provides a good way of outreaching to the general public.  I have created a set of geocaching courses that I have set up and run at events, parks, and other locations.  I favor "virtual geocaching" where the course still takes place outdoors, but rather than planting plastic or other containers, I use objects already on the landscape, such as light poles, trees, and so on.  Some of these geocaching courses are listed here; all contain a story “theme” to spark interest, such as “aliens land at city park!” 7.  Messaging.  For some events, consider not leading with the term “GIS” or “spatial analysis” might puzzle or alienate some.  Consider “Mapping” or “Spatial Thinking” or “Geo-enabling your …” or Telling Your Story through Maps.  I realize that "mapping” is not the end goal – it is admittedly an oversimplification, but it in one word at least gets to some of our message that is at least understandable to someone browsing an event program. 8.  Spreadsheets to Maps.  If you only have a short time, show (1) a table / spreadsheet; demonstrating attempting to understand it as is, but then show (2) a map of that same spreadsheets’ data.  The spreadsheet could be earthquake epicenters, location of hydroelectric dams, countries with high birth rates, or another topic that would resonate with your audience. 9.  Create story Maps to help people understand what GIS is – such as the Titanic with spatial distribution and graphs showing quantitative data.  Create story maps for campuses, events, or convention centers where you will be presenting.  The message is, if you create a story map in the day or hour before the event, so can your audience!  They are easy to create and yet powerful. 10. Incorporate Spatial Analysis.  Show, in ArcGIS Online, simple but powerful examples of spatial analysis, including the use of the Esri spatial analysis poster:  My live examples in ArcGIS Online usually include mapping earthquakes or some other natural hazard, some current event, John Snow’s cholera points, wells, and city streets, or mapping a specific business in a metro area, and creating a hot spot analysis, route, spatial interpolation, or heat map from it. 11.  Show current, real world events using multimedia and ArcGIS Online, making a Geo-News out of it and encouraging your audience to do the same. 12.  Use Simple but effective web maps to demonstrate and discuss:  600 world cities, plate tectonics with earthquakes, tornadoes, watersheds (drop pin and trace downstream), Starbucks locations, compare locations of two different types of businesses in your community; population change, median age, diversity, and tapestry segmentation. All of these activities are searchable in this blog. 13.  Show web mapping applications, including:  Landsat Change Viewer, and the Urban Observatory and invite conversation on the patterns and issues that you are showing. 14.  Core Messages:  Use Dr Charles Gritzner’s “What’s Where, Why There, and Why Care?” document as a memorable “core message."  Also consider using my own Working Definition of Spatial Thinking. 15.  Presentations versus Live Demos and Stories.  Limit the number of slides you show; it is much better usually to give live demos of GIS in action and tell stories about what you do with GIS, how you entered the field, and what interested you growing up and in school.   Ask questions during your presentation and foster inquiry! 16.  Paper map and satellite image or aerial photo activity:  Create a map from an aerial photograph activity, discuss map elements such as TODALSIGS.  Print aerial or satellite image, put in plastic sleeve, use markers to make thematic map on top of aerial. 17.  Landforms and land use quiz using satellite imagery:  Land use:  schools, hospitals, churches, shopping centers, golf courses, malls, apartments vs houses, railroads vs light rail, streets vs freeways, etc.  Landforms:  Karst, lava, grasslands, sand dunes, barrier islands, glacial terrain, ice fields, mesas and buttes, oxbow lakes, alluvial fans, deltas, wetlands, sinkholes.   Weird Earth Quiz:  Odd natural and human-built things on the landscape using satellite imagery.  Provide multiple choice questions.    Along these lines:  Other Quizzes:  Use Street View images to determine what city or country the image was taken; provide multiple choice questions. 18.  Think outside the Box:  Tap into community events and make a geo-something out of them.  I did this at History Colorado Museum’s “date night” and created an interactive Colorado geography quiz on the large terrazzo map on the floor, dubbing it “G-Harmony.” 19.  Don’t be afraid to use some paper maps and aerials/satellite imagery, and thematic maps to foster inquiry and a roll-up-your sleeves conversation around a table.  Obtain USGS and other large thematic sheets from www.omnimaps.com, ODT Maps, or other map dealers. 20.  Involve the audience in a crowdsourced map that you set up yourself, in answering a quiz, or something else map-related with their cell phones. Additional Resources include this GIS education blog, GIS Day, and this set of 2,700 videos. What are your ideas to reach out to the general public? ... View more

The Cherry Creek School District in Colorado has been using GIS in the curriculum and in administration for many years now.  When the STEM coordinators of the district told me recently that their students were launching weather balloons and recording atmospheric data from them, I jumped at the opportunity to show them how easy and powerful it is to map the data in ArcGIS Online.  The data from just one of the many balloons they had launched was stored in a standard spreadsheet and contained latitude and longitude coordinates, and therefore was a snap to map in ArcGIS Online.  This particular balloon, launched on 1 May 2015, flew over 56 miles (100 km) in 3 hours and 6 minutes, reaching a maximum altitude of 30.7 km, recording a minimum temperature of -59.3 C and achieving a maximum speed of 114 km/hour. I mapped the balloon based on its height on a satellite image base, which you can examine in ArcGIS Online by clicking on the map below. 2D map of weather balloon mapped by speed in ArcGIS Online. Since balloons fly in 3D space, a natural next step was to map the data as a 3D scene.  I used ArcGIS Pro to extrude selected attributes, such as height, and published the scene to ArcGIS Online, shown in two views and symbologies, below: 3D scene of weather balloon at its launch point mapped in ArcGIS Online. The track of this particular balloon followed the typical west-to-east prevailing winds, but as it neared the tropopause, it encountered stronger winds from the southeast, that not only blew it in the opposite direction, but also blew it higher in the atmosphere. 3D scene of weather balloon mapped by height in ArcGIS Online, looking southeast. What excites me not only is the ability of these tools to map the data that the students are collecting, but the power that they offer in terms of helping students understand the relationships among all of these variables.  The variables in this case included altitude, speed, heading, and temperature, but other data that the students have collected include atmospheric quality characteristics.  GIS provides a fundamental component of the district's STEM goals, perspectives, content knowledge, and skills.  Another thing about this project that excites me is that -- Grade 5 students are the ones engaged in this project--yes, 11 years olds, collecting and analyzing data! Think about the kinds of data that you and your students work with.  It may not be weather balloon data, but it occurs over space and time.  How could you use ArcGIS Online and the 3D scene viewer to map and understand your data? ... View more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfol-V_55GI I hope this is useful to many. Joseph Kerski ... View more

I have recently updated a document entitled "Why GIS in Education Matters" and have placed it online.  It represents my attempt to provide the most compelling and important reasons to teach and learn with Geographic Information Systems in a concise document that takes up no more than both sides of a single page.  While we have discussed other documents, messages, lessons, and videos in this blog over the years that are tailored to specific educational levels, needs, and content areas, this document contains the "essentials" that I have found resonate with the widest group of educators.  These essentials include critical thinking, career pathways, spatial thinking, the whys of where, asking good questions, sustainability and green technology, and mapping changes over space and time. I am interested in your reactions to this document:  What is missing from this document? What is useful about this document?  In what settings could you use this in your own work with fellow faculty, with faculty from other disciplines, with administrators, with parents, and with students?  What do you include in your own documents with similar goals? Why GIS in Education Matters, brief document outlining the value that teaching and learning with GIS brings to education. ... View more

I think many of you can relate to this: When you embed a video in a story map or Map Note, when it is done playing, by default it shows you the “related” videos – and “related” is definitely in quotes!  Sometimes these are really embarrassing and sit there in your story map as a set of “tiled” choices, OR worse yet, are on the “big screen” when you are presenting to a group.  Here is a little tip to avoid that: So, for example, compare this embed video of mine (you can skip to just a few seconds to the end to test it): https://www.youtube.com/embed/4IoImv0SyLM?rel=0 versus this one:  https://www.youtube.com/embed/4IoImv0SyLM The one with the rel=0 does not show the “related” ones at the end! If you forget the ?rel=0 code, then in YouTube just go to Share, Embed, and Show More, and you’ll see the choice there that you can Uncheck to avoid the related video display. Thanks to Owen Evans for his help with this. ... View more

One of the resources that I frequently use in instruction, and make publicly available in the hopes that it will be useful to other teachers and learners of GIS, remote sensing, geography, STEM, field methods, environmental studies, and related fields is my video channel, Geographyuberalles, or "geography is all".  I started the channel in 2008, and due to its current size, the best way to find something on it is to use the channel's search tool to search on terms such as Esri Maps for Office, ArcGIS Online, rivers, transportation, deserts, smartphones, geocaching, weather, population, professional development, or something else.  I also have provided an index of some of the most popular titles under categories such as "why geography matters", "oceans", and many more. Another way to find categories of videos there is to browse the channel's playlists.  The channel's playlists include a series on GPS-to-GIS, several courses I teach such as GIS and Public Domain Data, Creating Story Maps for education, Scale Matters, A Day in the Life of a Spatial Thinker, and A Deeper Dive into ArcGIS Online. There is even a series of geo-related song parodies that are truly awful, just for fun.  Some of these videos are mirrored on the Esri Education Team's video channel.  Keep in mind that a much more comprehensive and professional set of videos exists on the Esri Video Channel.  The Esri video channel includes new developments in Esri's technologies, the complete plenary presentations at each year's Esri User Conference, and much more. Give some of these videos a try and let me know what has worked for your instructional goals.  Also, if there are videos that you are particularly in need of that I might be able to create, I am happy to consider doing so. Over 2,600 GIS, GPS, STEM, Geography, Place, videos now online. This series of GPS to GIS is one of the many series' of videos available on the channel Geographyuberalles. ... View more

I am teaching a course this coming semester at the University of Denver entitled "Why Maps Still Matter--Geotechnologies for a Smarter Planet".  I would like to describe the course here with a larger purpose:  To start a discussion on the best approaches for teaching spatial analysis, mapping, and GIS for the "non-GIS community." Because my course is a part of the university's enrichment program, which is designed for the "love of learning" for the general public, I deliberately focused the title on something that everyone is familiar with--maps.  I also wanted to make a point about the relevancy of mapping, and that spatial analysis can help people make smarter decisions.  A partial version of the course description follows; the full description is here.Have you ever used your smartphone to locate the nearest coffee shop? Do you wear a fitness tracker? Have you played with Google Earth? What’s the common element among these helpful (and fun!) tools? Geotechnologies, such as GIS, GPS, Remote Sensing—all examples of the growing field of mapmaking. The impact of these technologies goes way beyond locating your favorite retailer; today’s maps can actually help to make the world safer, healthier and smarter. Join geographer and educator Joseph Kerski for a journey through some of the major issues of our 21st-century world to discover how maps are changing the ways we understand our planet. From natural disasters to global warming, from immigration patterns to transportation, from agriculture to epidemics, today’s maps not only provide location information, but also trends, projections and analyses. How exactly do today’s maps work? Each class features animations, videos and live web-based maps to illustrate advanced capabilities. Why are scale, resolution, data quality, projections, datums and other fundamentals of mapping still important? What impact are crowdsourcing, cloud-based computing and privacy having on mapping? How are maps being used to create a smarter planet? Map everything from real-time airplane locations to your last hike, explore some of the major challenges facing our 21st-century world, and discover why maps still matter. Recommended but not required: Internet access outside of the classroom; laptop or tablet for use in class. To get psyched about the course, watch the video:  Why get excited about web maps? What is the benefit of teaching mapping, spatial analysis, and/or GIS for the general public?  I know that many of us are quite passionate about sharing what we do and why it all matters to others, but, what are your goals in doing so?  Is it worth the effort? How have you taught these concepts and skills for the general public, or faculty or students outside your own discipline?  What are the approaches that you and your students have found to be the most helpful?  What activities have you included?  I will include a wide variety of topics and themes, including population change, water, lifestyles and demographics, business locations, energy, current events, natural hazards, and health, to name a few.   I will include a variety of tools, including ArcGIS Online, the Change Matters viewer, WorldMapper's cartograms, Esri Maps for Office, and the Urban Observatory.  What is the most suitable length for a course like this?  In the above case, I am teaching for a total of 7.5 hours, over three Thursday evenings.   This one is face-to-face, but since ArcGIS Online is the main tool I will be using, it could easily be taught online. Teaching "Why Maps Matter" for the General Public. I look forward to hearing about your experiences in this area of teaching to an audience outside of your own community. ... View more