Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

Who has ever looked in the newspaper or online and read that day’s extreme high and low temperatures for your country or for the world? Who has ever wanted to map that data? I thought so! Three years ago, I did exactly that when I created a data set and lesson on extreme daily temperatures for ArcGIS for the USA, which I updated last month for ArcGIS 10. But I also have just created a version for ArcGIS Online, which was easy to do given ArcGIS Online’s geocoding capabilities, and the lesson provide a pathway to spatial analysis with a fascinating data set. What is the relationship of temperature extremes to latitude, altitude, seasons, and proximity to coasts? Previous experience with GIS is not necessary to use this lesson, but the geographic perspective is important. Ideally, this lesson would be run during a unit on climate and weather. Data layers include extreme temperatures, a topographic map, and cultural features. The temperature data was gathered with the help of a stellar secondary school student. The map shows the locations of all of the places that recorded a high or low temperature extreme in the USA for each of the 31 days in January 2011 and the 31 days in July 2011. For example, on 15 January, the high temperature in the USA occurred in Santa Ana, California, and the low temperature on that date occurred in Northway, Alaska, and in Chicken, Alaska. Therefore, Santa Ana, Northway, and Chicken all are symbolized appropriately on this map. As expected, the January highs are mostly in the low latitudes and near coasts, such as Hawaii, southern California, Texas, and Florida, but by July have migrated inland to Arizona, Nevada, and Oklahoma, reflecting the southern plains heat wave that year. The January lows occur in the high latitudes of Minnesota, Montana, and Alaska. By July, some remain in Alaska but others migrate to high altitudes in Montana, Oregon, Colorado, and even as far south as Arizona. I couldn’t stop there, because another data set just aching to be mapped were the historical high and low temperature extremes for each state. I have now also mapped these in ArcGIS Online and packaged with a lesson. This map shows the locations where the all-time low and high temperature occurred in each state, dating back to the late 1800s. As such, fascinating patterns in space and time are visible, such as record highs from the Dust Bowl years that still stand today, and the effects of latitude, altitude, and proximity to coasts. Both of these data sets and lessons could find good homes in climatology, meteorology, and geography courses, but also in mathematics courses and in the last example, in a history course. Feel free to modify either lesson with your own questions. How might you be able to use these resources in your courses? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in BioBlitz 2012 at Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA. BioBlitz is a 10-year partnership between the US National Park Service and National Geographic with three goals: (1) Highlight the diversity of national parks by conducting a taxonomic inventory; (2) public outreach; (3) to inspire young people to pursue careers in science and geography. During one day, I went into the field to collect and categorize macroinvertebrates in a beautiful montane stream (shown here in ArcGIS Online) with 40 students aged 11 to 13. Collecting macroinvertebrates in stream. After collecting the data over a period of five hours, the data was identified by the students according to a detailed classification chart. The data was then input into a web-GIS called FieldScope, created by National Geographic and based on Esri technology, and viewable that same evening by anyone on the web. It was wonderful to work with our partners at National Geographic and in particular, with students, and four things struck me through this event. First, it is important to get students into the field repeatedly, and at young ages, to provide rich experiences and a love for the outdoors and the environment. During the next day, I met environmental and youth advocate Juan Martinez, who had a powerful experience with an Eco Club in south Los Angeles that changed his life. I was impressed by the high quality and collaborative nature of the students’ work. They were interested not only in getting wet collecting data, but they were just as interested in classifying the data. In fact, they were so immersed that nobody happened to notice a bear about 100 meters away, documented by a photograph that another group showed our group later that day! Adding citizen science data to FieldScope. Second, powerful things can happen when students and professional scientists collaborate, as evident here and with such efforts as GeoMentor, GIS Corps, and Project Budburst. BioBlitz brought together hundreds of students, over 100 scientists, and thousands of the general public whose two days of data collection resulted in over 400 bird, fungi, macroinvertebrate, animal, and vascular plant species that had never been documented in this particular national park before. Third, the event reinforced the concepts that Jill Clark and I wrote about in the book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data: As citizen science projects gain in popularity, enabled by powerful, easy-to-use web-GIS and field collection instruments, how can data collected by a wide variety of people be managed and cataloged that is useful and allows people to understand how that data was collected, categorized, and mapped? What are some meaningful field experiences that you have had? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

One of the recurring themes in GIS education blogs, forums, listservs, conferences, and in our recent book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data is the importance of paying attention to the characteristics of data so that correct interpretations of that data can be made when mapping that data. During some recent work with one of our favorite resources mentioned in the book, that of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, (CIESIN), I examined a map showing the population density for central Europe (shown in image). As I examined the map, population density for Germany seemed unnaturally higher than that of France. True, according to a variety of outside sources, Germany does have roughly twice the population density as does France (235 people per square kilometer for Germany versus 108 for France). But the map seemed to indicate that broad areas of Germany are even higher in density, approaching that of The Netherlands. Is this accurate? Upon further investigation into the metadata, indeed, the resolution of the data set was to blame. CIESIN uses the highest resolution data available for generating maps like this, and the data they were able to obtain for France had a much higher resolution. The resolution is calculated as the square root of the land area divided by the number of administrative units. For Germany, it was 28, and for France, 4. The resulting population per administrative unit in 2000 was 184,000 for Germany versus only 2,000 for France. A-ha! Close examination of the map prompted my initial concern: The areas mapped in Germany are much larger than in France. But the differences in data collection could not be confirmed until the metadata was examined. Fortunately, CIESIN does an extremely good job documenting their sources and methods. The user still needs to make it a point to read that documentation. But what should we do when working with sites that do not document their data well? In today’s world of a myriad of data, maps, and tools, it is more important than ever to have a good grounding in map interpretation and spatial analysis, but also to ask questions of the data you are using. How can we as the GIS education community foster this kind of questioning of data by our students? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

I created a lesson where students determine the optimal location for a bicycle and ski rental and sales shop using Esri’s Community Analyst software. The lesson begins with a scenario where the student’s task is to select the best site near one of the oldest and most beautiful rail-to-trail segments in the country—the Sparta-Elroy Trail in west-central Wisconsin. I have personally bicycled this trail, including its three famous railroad tunnels, and sometimes those personal connections to the area being studied make curriculum creation all the more enjoyable, and, I hope, valuable. Students using the lesson examine local terrain, proximity to towns, the trail (shown by the thick green line in the image), interstate highways, campgrounds, and state parks, the area’s population, median income, amount of money spent by regional households on bicycling equipment in the past year, and the location of existing bicycle rental and sales shops. They also consider customers who would rent versus own the equipment, and consider how winter sports such as cross country skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling would impact the shop’s year-round and overall viability. I chose Esri’s Community Analyst platform for several reasons. The platform is cloud-based, and as no software is needed, accessing the toolkit is as easy as accessing a web browser and logging into Community Analyst. Some universities have access to this toolkit already, so check with your university. If the software is not part of your university license agreement, you can request a 30 day free trial. Better yet, ask your university Esri software point of contact to add Community Analyst in the future. The toolkit can easily create reports, thematic maps, 5-, 10-, and 15-minute drive time buffers around proposed locations, and export those maps and reports. The software includes thousands of data variables, not only Census data, but thousands of consumer behavior and expenditure variables, plus thousands of business locations. I still feel like I’m in Willy Wonka’s candy shop when I’m using it because like many of you, I have gone the “long route” numerous times over the past 25 years, spending hours, days, and weeks formatting data from various sites to be able to get it to the point where I could analyze it. With Community Analyst, the data is at your fingertips, ready to be analyzed! How might you use this lesson, or create a site selection lesson of your own using Community Analyst, to foster spatial thinking, business skills, and GIS skills? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Now that it is easy to gather tracks and waypoints on a smartphone and map them in a GIS, it provides a good opportunity to remind students about the importance of being critical of and paying attention to data. I recently went on a walk around a local reservoir and used the Motion X GPS app on my iPhone to collect my track and a few waypoints. I emailed the data to myself and added the GPX file to ArcGIS Online so I could map and examine the track. I made my results public and made it visible below to feature some teachable moments. Zoom in and examine my track and its attributes. How many times did I walk around the reservoir, and in what direction? What, then, is the line that extends from the reservoir 630 meters to the northwest? When I first turned on the smartphone and began my track, the GPS in the phone did not have enough information to plot my true position. Therefore, the positions plotted were nearby, but not exactly where I was walking until later. Examine the track and its attributes to determine how long I had been walking before the positions become accurate. These “zingers” or inaccuracies often occur with tracks recorded on a smartphone, and on a standard GPS receiver as well. These results reinforce what we’ve long held as a “best practice”—to wait at your starting point as long as you can after starting your GPS or your Smartphone’s GPS app to ensure the most accurate positions possible on the data you will gather. After the first 10 minutes, I was quite happy with the accuracy of Motion X GPS, within 1 to 2 meters as compared to the imagery in ArcGIS Online. Using ArcGIS Online you can clearly see each of my three laps around the reservoir. You can even see my attempt to write something in the parking lot using my smartphone using GPS drawing techniques, explained in this video I filmed. Although my letters should have been larger for increased clarity and avoid bumping up against the spatial accuracy of the GPS, I was still pleased with this portion of the experiment. How might you use GPS apps on smartphones and ArcGIS Online to teach the principles and skills of accuracy, precision, GPS, and critical thinking? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

In my last column, I argued that one’s senses, curiosity, and the spatial perspective are essential for understanding our world and for making the most out of field experiences. In this column I wish to make the case that these three things guide the questions you ask. And the questions that you ask are most important thing about any investigation, and about learning. I also believe that you must be comfortable with the fact that in our complex world, some of the questions cannot be answered without additional investigation, and that some of the questions indeed may never be fully answered. In our world of instant information and standardized testing, quick and easy answers are difficult for many students—and sometimes, instructors—to accept. Consider a recent video I made on the beach on the coast of the Caribbean Sea where I asked a series of geographic questions. I considered issues in physical geography including sediment transport along coasts, beach sand, storm surges, and hurricanes, and issues in cultural geography including the pros and cons of developing resorts along coasts. I could partly answer some questions I posed in a few minutes, while others I left open for students and instructors to discuss in class. The questions you ask determine what data and information you will collect, what devices you require, and what methods you will use. We certainly have more means of collecting data than ever before. I believe that geographers from Eratosthenes to Davis would have been thrilled to have and use the tools we have today. We also have an expanding number of ways to map field-collected data. Some of these ways even allow for something that many of us have longed for years to be able to do—to collaboratively and simultaneously gather data in their real-world coordinates by a group of students while out in the field, and have that data automatically appear on a continuously updating map. These can be done using the Student Data Mapper or from shared Google spreadsheets as developed by my colleague Tom Baker, or via editable feature services using ArcGIS 10.1 and ArcGIS Online as shown in the image below. Yet unless we are curious, using our senses, asking insightful, thoughtful questions, and using the spatial perspective, the effectiveness of even these tools will be limited. What are some of the means you have used to foster good questions to be grappled with? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

In my last column, I raised the question about whether a travel column would look different authored from the perspective of a geographer or geospatial professional versus a column authored from the perspective of a journalist. I stated that some similarities surely exist but there are likely to be some key differences. This discussion raises a larger issue: Are all travel writers really geographers? Are all travelers essentially geographers? And, more broadly: With the advent of easy to use geotechnologies that have enabled the general public to use many of the same tools and data that were formerly only used by GIS specialists, does that mean that everyone is now a geographer? In the new book Practicing Geography , my colleagues and I wrote a chapter that asks this very question. These new capabilities reinvoke inherent tensions between the integrity of the field of geography as a discrete academic discipline, on the one hand, and its generalist appeal on the other hand. Although this tension within geography is not new—William Morris Davis reacted to it over one hundred years ago (Schulten 2001)—geography may have never been more prominent within the everyday human experience than it is today . I contend that geography is a three-legged stool. One of the legs of the stool represents deep and rich content knowledge that has accumulated across the millennia but also is forward-looking—envisioning how the world could and should be. The content knowledge includes that about specific places, processes, and phenomena. Another of the legs represents geographic skills—working with scale, maps, imagery, databases, graphs, space and time, movement, dispersion, fieldwork, regions from cultural regions to ecoregions, different perspectives, human-environment interaction, interpreting the past and present and planning for the future, and many more. The skills are used in low tech and high tech situations ranging from interpreting paper maps to operating field probes and performing geoprocessing operations within a GIS environment. The last leg represents the spatial perspective—the unique place-based framework that all geographers bring to any problem that they examine. The spatial perspective is holistic; it is systems-based. What are your thoughts about this topic: Isn’t everyone a geographer? And, what about the increasing number of professionals outside who are incorporating spatial thinking and GIS into their work—in business, history, mathematics, design, biology, engineering and other fields. Are they geographers? Do they need to be geographers? If not, what geographic content knowledge, skills, and perspective do they need to have in order to be effective in their own fields? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager Reference Schulten, S. 2001. The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880-1950. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ... View more

I have just created 7 videos totaling 90 minutes of content in a series entitled “Teaching Geography with ArcGIS Online” on the Esri Education Team’s channel, beginning here. This series began with a workshop I taught at the Geographical Association conference. One goal I had in creating the videos is to model how ArcGIS can be used in an instructional setting. The first 3 parts in the series focus on why and how web-based GIS can be used to teach geography, specifically, ArcGIS Online. One reason I chose ArcGIS Online as the main tool is because it allows students, using only a web browser and an internet connection, to quickly investigate real world issues in real places, from local to global scale, developing spatial thinking, critical thinking, and GIS skills and “habits of mind” in the process. These maps can be customized, saved, edited, and shared with others. While each of the first three parts provides practical examples, parts 4 through 7 in the series delve deeply in problem solving with specific issues and themes. Part 4 uses World Bank data and maps to investigate global demographic variables, including birth rate, life expectancy, and population change, by country, from 1960 to the present. Part 5 analyzes the pattern of neighborhood deprivation and poverty, and lack thereof, using the UK as an example. Part 6 asks questions about plate tectonics , including earthquakes, plates, volcanoes, on a global scale, and then analyzes seismic and volcanic activity on a local scale in Texas and on Mount Etna, Italy. This video also shows how to bring in real-time data into the analysis to compare the difference between the last 30 days of earthquakes versus earthquakes dating back hundreds of years. Part 7 discusses three ways to map data that students have collected, by directly adding points, lines, and areas, from data from the field via GPS and smartphones, and from multimedia sources, including video, photographs, sketches, and text onto maps and presentations that tell the story of their project. How could you and your students make use of these videos, and how could you use ArcGIS Online in the classroom? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Those of us in the fields of geography, education, and GIS can probably name numerous games and activities that we are attracted to simply because there is “something spatial” about them. Some of them may have to do with wayfinding, others with angles and directions, patterns and shapes, distances, adjacency, groups, or may rely on geographic content knowledge. In Monopoly, I always sought houses and hotels on Oriental, Vermont, and Connecticut Avenues simply because I liked where they were positioned on the board. I wasn’t deterred by the fact that they were on the “cheap” side of the board (consequently, I seldom won). I enjoy playing Blokus and putting together jigsaw puzzles because of their spatial aspects (although I never could get the top pieces in the 3-D globe puzzle I helped put together this past New Year’s Eve). Many of us were fond of the blue category in the original Trivial Pursuit game, which was geography (and were subsequently embarrassed whenever we missed a geography question!). I loved the angles and positions in early video games such as Pong and Galaga, and was frustrated by Asteroids largely because it seemed that the scale was wrong. Millions of people play Spatial IQ, Cross Fingers, Glass Tower, and other spatially oriented games on their computers and smartphones daily. And outside, while I found the directions to my one and only road rally game too complicated, I greatly enjoy confluence hunting, geocaching, and earthcaching. A small but growing community of researchers and instructors is exploring how the playing of games can foster spatial thinking, content knowledge, and skills important in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, geography, and GIS. My colleague Dr. Diana Stuart Sinton teaches a class called the “Foundations of Spatial Thinking” as part of the Learning Spatially at the University of Redlands program. One of her assignments to the students is to categorize games and activities in terms of the spatial strategies used, and how the strategies may be relevant for STEM learning. Dr. Ola Ahlqvist has an NSF cyber learning grant to develop and study learning with GeoGames. National Geographic supported Reach The World’s development of geo-games. The world of geospatially-oriented games on smartphones and computers is poised for great expansion, with the inclusion of real spaces and places in these games posing intriguing potential for teaching, learning, and research. Imagine any game scenario not in an imaginary world but taking place using imagery and maps of Davenport, or Shreveport, or anywhere. What are your favorite spatially-oriented games? How might you use games to foster spatial thinking and learning? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

In my last blog post, I mentioned that universities are increasingly thinking about implementing courses entitled “Introduction to Spatial Thinking”. I described a few existing excellent models for such courses, inviting comments from the community. Development of such courses would be hastened by community dialog so that each faculty member does not feel like he or she has to develop such a course from scratch. In this essay, I would like to share components that would valuable in such a course. I believe such a course should include a mix of reflections on readings and videos, and hands-on work with GIS and GPS technologies. An active discussion on the theoretical underpinnings of spatial thinking is necessary, because most students entering such a course most likely have had minimal exposure to geography in the past, and most likely have not purposely thought about the applicability of spatial thinking to their education, career, or life. I would begin with selected videos and essays to foster discussion, including the Geospatial Revolution, GIS Touches our everyday lives, my ArcWatch article Spatial Thinking: Habits of Mind, and my video Why Geography Education Matters. I would access articles on the bibliography on the Esri Education Community from Diana Stuart Sinton, Sarah Bednarz, Reg Golledge, and Phil Gersmehl, among others. Whether face to face or online, I would promote active engagement with geospatial technologies. Easy-to-implement yet powerful activities would use ArcGIS Online, including Earth Quiz: Name that Place, analyzing the distribution of bail bonds and car washes in a metropolitan area, Weird Earth (Using strange and unusual imagery to spark inquiry), Exploring 10 Landscapes (such as eskers, karst, and lava fields), analyzing 10 aspects of water, (including watersheds, wetlands, dams and reservoirs, and oceans), and analyzing demographic components and their implications (such as median age, income, diversity, population density, and population change over time). Over the course of the semester, I would gradually increase the analytical rigor, using ArcGIS for Desktop with selected lessons from the Our World GIS Education books, siting a ski area using GIS, and determining the mean center of population for the USA and for individual states, 1790-2010. I would frequently include getting students out onto the campus or in their own neighborhoods (if the course is online), collecting data, mapping data, hyperlinking text, video, and photographs, and analyzing resulting patterns within a GIS environment. I would require frequent presentations from students, including a presentation at the end of the semester, asking each student: How do you use spatial thinking each day, how have you used spatial thinking to solve three problems in this course, and how will you use GIS in the future? What would you include in a course on spatial thinking? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Just in time for Earth Day, but suitable for use throughout the year in geography, earth science, environmental science, chemistry, social studies, and in other disciplines is a new lesson that invites students to learn about water using ArcGIS Online. Water is a spatial subject: It easily moves among its solid, liquid, or gas phases on our planet. It flows through oceans, rivers, wetlands, glaciers, and through the hydrologic cycle at different rates. It is affected by long-term climate, everyday weather, hurricanes, landforms, and air pressure. It has been channeled into settling ponds, water treatment plants, fields, irrigation ditches, drainage ditches, canals, reservoirs, and many other means by humans. It acts as a change agent above, on, and below the surface of the Earth, affecting crop yields, aquifers, erosion, floods, stream sediment, soil chemistry, weathering, and much more. Thus, the geographic perspective and GIS are useful to understanding water from local to global scales. These activity use ArcGIS Online, a Web-based Geographic Information System (GIS). Students at the upper secondary/university level can use the lesson, but so can those at the lower secondary level, and the lesson can be modified for primary level. It can be used in formal or informal educational settings and in a whole-class format or in a lab. No previous experience with GIS is necessary but (1) the geographic perspective is important, and (2) a background discussion in the topic investigated will be helpful. For example: “What are watersheds and why are they important?” Through the activities, students investigate major dams and reservoirs, cities along rivers, flood zones, food production, wetlands, and water quality. These include the following questions and assignments: What is the relationship between wind speed and direction to precipitation, current air pressure, temperature, and topography? Using USGS stream gages and weather stations, predict the height of the water in streams where significant precipitation has been occurring. What is the relationship between the location of the gaging station within the watershed and the height of the river? Go outside! Do current weather local conditions match the map you have been examining? Predict tomorrow’s conditions based on the maps you are examining. How could you use ArcGIS Online to teach about water in your instruction? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Two points in particular struck me as we talked with hundreds of science educators recently at our workshops and exhibit (video) at the National Science Teachers Association’s annual convention. First, ArcGIS Online offers a rich set of data, tools, and capabilities for educators and their students to begin using. And I think an important advantage of ArcGIS Online is that they could begin using it right away. Everyone we talked with could see a connection with what they are teaching, whether in earth science, biology, environmental science, chemistry, mathematics, or other subjects, and analyzing data spatially with ArcGIS Online. That leads me to the second point: Sometimes, the thing that really resonates with an educator is something that might seem small. However, for that educator, it becomes a game-changer for a particular lesson or maybe for the entire course curriculum. It could be a tool, data set, or process that allows them to accomplish more efficiently with GIS than what they could do with paper maps or other physical objects. Using ArcGIS allows students to more quickly move to the analytical phase of a project, working with real data in real contexts. One example of the small-but-big is a discussion I had with an educator from Shoshoni, Wyoming. In this arid part of the mountain west, watering dry fields to grow grass for livestock takes precious water resources. Ants are the one thing that is found in abundance. Ants cause a problem because their large colonies consume a tremendous amount of grass. Eradication with chemicals is ineffective due to the depth of the colonies. Students in the town’s high school routinely get out into the field to measure these ant colonies with GPS and tape measures. When the instructor saw that not only could he and his students use ArcGIS Online to visualize and measure the ant colonies from above, but also geotag and add field observations, audio, photographs, and video to the project, he was overjoyed. As additional fieldwork is conducted, the ArcGIS Online map becomes a living database over space and time. What is the little thing that you learned to do with GIS that caused major changes in what and how you teach? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

A new book from Esri Press entitled Tribal GIS: Supporting Native American Decision Making, will be published in June 2012. In it, tribal leaders tell their stories about implementing and using GIS to address their unique challenges as sovereign Nations. The book covers applications in natural resources and the environment, transportation, cultural and historical preservation, economic development, health, public safety, agriculture, and perhaps most interesting to the GIS education community, two chapters on K-12 and higher education. Showing how tribal governments responsible for the stewardship of their land and resources and the health and well-being of their People use enterprise GIS to make decisions, Tribal GIS supports tribes new to GIS and those with GIS experience. It also will be useful for the general GIS community, showing the many scales and disciplines in which GIS can be applied. It was an honor to work on this book with so many visionary people who are making a positive difference in the lives of people, in their communities and on their lands, and beyond. The book includes dozens of stories written by educators, scientists, administrators, managers, and others, showing the diversity of their backgrounds but also a common vision for the benefits that spatial analysis and GIS bring to their everyday decision making. Editors of the book include Anne Taylor, who coordinates Esri’s Tribal program, David Gadsden, who coordinates Esri’s nonprofit organization program, Joseph Kerski, who serves in Esri’s education program, and Heather Warren, who is the marketing coordinator for the federal government industry at Esri. The education chapters include stories such as students at the Alamo Navajo School collecting water well location and water quality information for the tribal government, students at Santa Fe Indian School measuring soil erosion and analyzing land use, students at Haskell Indian Nations University researching the geology of Antarctica and developing an accessibility map for their own campus, and much more. Space does not permit me to say too much here, but the stories speak for themselves. Pick up a copy of the book, read these stories, and share them with your students. How have the spatial perspective and GIS made a positive difference and aided with decision making? How might you be able to use these stories to generate ideas for your own GIS-based projects? --Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

The combination of maps and stories, particularly those that show how a city or region has changed over time, is a powerful resource for educators and students of history and geography, researchers, planners, and the general public. Thanks to Esri’s web GIS technologies, these tools are rapidly multiplying, providing a rich set of data to investigate an expanding number of places around the world. One of these is the new Pittsburgh Mapping and Historical Site Viewer. This resource shows how Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania evolved over time, from 22,433 people in 1835 to a major metropolitan area. Explore it at a small scale to get an overview of the metropolitan area. From which point did the city originally begin? Why was its river site simultaneously a blessing to the city but also a danger? What challenges did the local hilly topography pose, and how did the city grow to accommodate it? Explore the site at a large, detailed scale, studying how neighborhoods grow and expand, and how some were planned but never built. Can you find any street names that changed over time? Can you find empty lots that became buildings, schools and churches that opened and closed, and where urban renewal project s cleared neighborhoods, and then later were themselves reconstructed? By browsing through the years via a convenient slider bar at any given location, you will find a cemetery that became a school, the arrival of rail yards and then sports stadiums, and other indicators of how the city has evolved around changes in transportation, industry, and population. You will find photographs linked to specific landmarks and buildings with links to additional information. What was demolished to make way for the Civic Arena in 1961? What sports teams played there? Now that demolition on the arena has begun in 2012, what do you think the neighborhood will look like once it is gone? This resource is largely the result of diligent and careful work by my Esri colleague Chris Olsen. Digital maps were made by cutting and georeferencing hand-drawn paper maps, some more than 175 years old. Chris first examined the wealth of data from the Historic Pittsburgh project, including 46 volumes of Hopkins maps, which he digitally stitched together and compared it to what is on the ground today. He downloaded the raw map plates, cleaned up each image, clipped out the map data, and georeferenced each plate in ArcMap, saving each to the Web Mercator Aux Sphere projection. He then created mosaic datasets grouped by area and year, created MXD and MSD documents using the overlay map at small scales, and switched to the mosaics at large scales. Next, he cached the maps and created the web apps. The feature service on top of the maps was created from the National Registry of Historic Places and the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation. He is still adding additional content to these. How can you use the Pittsburgh Mapping and Historical Site Viewer in your educational work? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

Take a look at this image. Where is Socotra? Why and how do these trees grow there? Where is the Richat Structure? Why are its origins still a bit mysterious? Why do people create drawings on the landscape that can only be fully appreciated from above? What do you notice about the language of the text, the street names, and the landscape that give clues about the location of this image? Examining the Earth with imagery can be a powerful resource in geography, biology, environmental studies, earth science, and in other courses. Examining imagery can be easily done through the use of ArcGIS Online. The above images are included in an investigation I entitled “Weird Earth.” This investigation includes the images above, as well as a giant lizard, mazes, an erupting volcano, the walled city in the mist, and much more. Why Weird Earth? First, fascinating patterns, places, and phenomena abound on our planet, and some are just plain weird. Examining the bizarre is an excellent way of sparking student interest. As images are examined, the door for inquiry is opened: What physical and environmental factors caused the land and vegetation to look as it does? What do human-created objects on the landscape say about the culture and language there? What will these images look like tomorrow, in 10 years, in 100 years? Second, I wanted to illustrate that the presentation mode in ArcGIS Explorer Online is an effective and easy-to-use technology to teach such concepts. View the metadata here.  You can also watch the investigation as a video with the introduction here, the investigation here, and the answers and final discussion here. The presentation is dynamic: You can change the scale and basemaps from satellite images to topographic maps, street maps, and much more, while posing questions, fostering deeper inquiry into places and the processes at work behind those places. For example, when you engage students in examining Socotra using the above slide, zoom in to examine hills versus valleys and the amount of tree cover on each. Zoom out until someone recognizes the island’s location. Then discuss the effect of isolation, latitude, and altitude on the vegetative cover, and why 1/3 of the species are endemic to the Socotra Islands. Change the basemap to topographic to determine the height of the mountains and the depth of the valleys. You can add ecoregions and climate map layers and discuss how these influence the bizarre trees and other species on the island. You can add a population layer and discuss the settlement pattern of the island. Thus, these are by no means static slides. Even calling them “slides” is really a misnomer. Even better, create your own investigations focused on other processes, specific themes, specific regions, or your own community. What do you consider unique or “weird” about your own community? How might you use the concept of Weird Earth in your own teaching and learning? How can you use ArcGIS Online to investigate what is strange and interesting about your own community? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more