Latest Contributions by JosephKerski

I recently created a set of activities based on using web-based GIS tools to teach spatial thinking using drive-time buffers, a set of activities that use viewsheds as a teaching tool, another on the use of zonal statistics, and another on analyzing the best route to a facility.  Each of these shares common elements:  They are all based on Esri GIS technology.  They are all free, easy to use, powerful, and they foster spatial thinking.  Let's use another GIS tool to investigate routing around barriers.  Barriers may be physical, such as ridges or rivers, or they may be a human construct or consequence, such as one-way streets, road repair, or an accident. Routing around barriers Examine the routing around barriers mapping application.  Let's say you are running a bicycle courier service in downtown San Diego.  Your pick up point is at 1 st Avenue and Market Street.  Your destination is at 10 th Avenue and Market Street.  Add these 2 stops and have the map calculate your route, shown in blue.  But now say there is construction at 7 th Avenue and Market.  Use Add Barriers and add a barrier at 7 th Avenue and Market (3 blocks due west of 10 th and Market). What changed on your map after you added a barrier, and why?  Experiment with additional barriers in different locations around downtown San Diego.  Zoom out and repeat the operation with a slightly different scenario at this new scale:  Now you're in a truck filled with trees that you must deliver around metropolitan San Diego.  How can you most efficiently deliver your trees to 4 urban gardens around the city?  Add barriers and observe how they change your route's pattern.  How much additional time do you estimate would be required to make your deliveries with these new barriers? How might you be able to use this tool in your instruction to foster spatial thinking? ... View more

I recently created a set of activities based on using web-based GIS tools to teaching spatial thinking using drive-time buffers, another set of activities that use viewsheds, and another on the use of zonal statistics.    Typical modern GIS tasks also include determining the best route and the closest facilities to specific locations.  This is important for a wide range of applications, from emergency services bringing people in an ambulance to the nearest hospital to the nearest competitor to your planned new bicycle rental facility. Finding the Route and the Closest Facility to a chosen point. Open this web map and click somewhere on the map in northeastern San Francisco that represents a location where let's say you are currently located.  What is the closest facility to your chosen point?  Change the choice under the map to find the routes for the 1 closest facility to a point to 2 closest facilities. Two routes are shown in this image; I selected one of them, highlighted in cyan, and the directions are given for this route. This tool is easy to run with the above link and yet can lead to so many wonderful discussions about the Can you think of real-world situations where a route to two or more closest facilities would be needed from a given point, besides the emergency and bicycle examples I gave above?  Name them and discuss why this type of analysis is so critical to our 21st Century world. ... View more

I recently created a set of activities based on using web-based GIS tools to teaching spatial thinking using drive-time buffers, and another set of activities that use viewsheds.   Another type of spatial analysis computes and summarizes data from points, lines, or polygons, and is called “zonal statistics.”  To easily use an application of zonal statistics, use this map to summarize population in specific areas. Calculating the population of the Atlanta area with zonal statistics tool. After accessing the map, click "Summarize Population" in the  lower left section of the map and then draw a polygon that encompasses Atlanta, Georgia. What is the population of the Atlanta area?  Why is your result likely to be different each time you draw the polygon?  How does the population of an area of similar size in rural Georgia compare to the population of Atlanta?  How does the population of an area of similar size in rural Wyoming compare to rural Georgia?  Compare your counts to areas of similar sizes in the Ganges River basin in India, or to an area in the Sahara Desert.  Why is the base data that is being used for the population counts critical to the specific results you receive from these calculations?  Test the results over the ocean:  Do the counts total zero? How might you be able to use this tool in teaching and learning about issues of map projections, data quality, zonal statistics, and other spatial concepts? ... View more

I recently posted a set of activities based on using web-based GIS tools to teaching spatial thinking using drive-time buffers.  Viewsheds are another type of buffer.  Viewsheds indicate how much terrain is visible from specified locations.  Viewsheds are important not only in planning scenic overlooks along trails and highways, but help in everyday decisions such as siting optimal locations for cell phone towers, determining how much terrain would be in shadow if a certain high-rise were to be constructed, helping plan safe roadway curves, and much more.  Open this map to create your own viewsheds. Teaching spatial concepts with viewsheds. This map service shades the terrain viewable within 5 miles of your chosen point.  Say you are interested in taking photographs in San Francisco but you only have 2 hours to do so, during your airplane’s layover at SFO.  You want to be as efficient as possible, choosing locations that allow you a magnificent view.  Click in several locations on the map and observe the viewshed after each location. Your viewshed should be greater if you click on one of San Francisco’s many hills.  For example, I created the viewshed shown here using the above link. Judging from the shape of the viewshed, at this point would you be standing on a south-facing hillside or a north-facing hillside?  Next, click on the Golden Gate Bridge (leading northward from San Francisco on US 101).   Why is the 5 mile viewshed so much greater in area at this location? What is the viewshed from Fisherman's Wharf? From Telegraph Hill?  From the Financial District in the streets amongst the tall buildings? How might you be able to use these viewshed tools in your teaching? ... View more

Teaching spatial concepts and analysis can be effectively done with web-based GIS tools.  One type of spatial analysis involves the use of buffers--areas that show proximity to mapped features.  One kind of buffer is a “drive time” or “service area” buffer, which can be used to calculate and display the amount of time required to walk, bicycle, or drive to or from a certain location.  This developer map is also useful for teaching  to create some buffers, in this case, drive time. 1-2-3 minute drive time buffers Click on a location in the city of Lawrence, Kansas and wait a moment for the drive time buffer to appear.  Ask the students:  Why aren't these buffers a perfect circle?  Click on Interstate Highway 70 and note the differences between the buffer along this limited access highway versus a buffer along city streets.  Click on a point just north of the river and note the effect of the river that blocks quick access to areas south of it. These drive time buffers depend not only on the street location and density, but they have intelligence beyond street location:  They take into account one-way streets, stop signs and stop lights, traffic volume, speed limit, physical barriers, and terrain.  Pan the map to a rural area outside Lawrence and click on the map in that location.  What is the difference in the amount of terrain someone could reach in 1, 2, and 3 minutes from a rural area versus that from an urban area?  Why do these differences exist? Pan to the location where you live and calculate drive time buffers in different locations in your own community. For an application of this concept in analyzing access to a specific type of business, access this map showing pizza restaurants that are within a 3 minute drive of the location you select.  Click on various locations and note the differences in the buffer and the resulting selected restaurants.  This service uses a Yahoo! Local Search to calculate its drive time, but also note that terrain is still important.  In other words, yes, physical geography still matters! Both of these live maps and the services they provide are easy to use, fascinating, and can foster much good discussion about the practical application of spatial thinking and analysis. ... View more

At the last Esri International User Conference, my Esri education colleague Laura Bowden and I conducted a spatial thinking workshop.  Laura said something in the workshop that I have been musing about ever since: "Be spatially critical." This phrase is laden with meaning and examining it in this blog may shed light on why this community believes so firmly in the value of research and practice in GIS in education. Be Spatially Critical ! Effectively using GIS in teaching and learning hinges upon critical thinking and spatial thinking.  For example, some critical thinking questions relate to the context of a problem:  What background research do I need to examine and what content do I need to immerse myself in to be knowledgeable about the issue?  What are the costs and benefits of the issue I am analyzing?  Who are the stakeholders affected by the issue?  What are the historical, current, and future implications surrounding the issue? At the 1987 conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform, Scriven and Paul stated that critical thinking means to "conceptualize, apply, analyze, synthesize and/or evaluate information gathered from, or generalized by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication, as a guide to belief or action [or argument]."  GIS can be used to foster such actions, and in practice, this is where critical and spatial thinking meet: What data do I need to gather and analyze to assess the issue completely and accurately?  How can I represent that issue within a GIS environment using raster and vector data sets, multimedia, graphs and charts, and by other means and tools?  Can I trust my data sources?  At what scale do I need to examine my chosen issue?  What data will support that scale of analysis?  What symbology, classification, and presentation techniques should I choose to effectively communicate my results? Other questions are specific to an instructional environment:  As an instructor, how can I best teach to encourage students to be spatially critical?  As a student, what content knowledge, skills, and geographic perspectives do I need to cultivate in order to develop my ability to become spatially critical? In sum, the phrase "Be Spatially Critical" includes elements of critical thinking and spatial thinking, both of which my colleagues and I frequently write about in this blog.  Laura Bowden and I plan to conduct a spatial thinking workshop at the 2013 Esri User Conference as well, and we look forward to reading your comments here and interacting with you during the workshop! ... View more

The phrase "spatial thinking" has been receiving increasing attention over the past 15 years, encouraged in part from the National Research Council's report Learning to Think Spatially:  GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum.   However, in many ways, we in the GIS education community have been immersed in promoting and supporting spatial thinking in education for far longer than that; indeed, for over 20 years.  Beginning in the early 1990s, a handful of innovative K-12 teachers, along with a few interested faculty in universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies working closely with K-12 educators, as well as the Esri Education Team (which began in 1992), to bring spatial thinking through the use of GIS tools to primary and secondary schools.  At the same time, the Esri Higher Education program began.  At the university level, spatial thinking has long been nurtured by research and practice from the fields of geography, science education, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, and others. Spatial Thinking: Perspective, Skills, and Content. What exactly is spatial thinking?  There have been many attempts to define it.   My interest in it lies mostly on the geographic side, so, perhaps my definition is better labeled as "geospatial thinking."  This overlaps some with "geoliteracy", which has also been receiving increasing attention.  My working definition of spatial thinking is "Identifying, analyzing, and understanding the location, scale, patterns, and trends of the geographic and temporal relationships among data, phenomena, and issues." More important to me than the definition, though is that the diverse communities of scholars and practitioners who care about this topic work together to ensure that spatial thinking is supported, taught, and put to use in education and in society.  What is our goal in terms of spatial thinking?  I like how the NRC report puts it:  It is to cultivate the spatial thinking "habit of mind."  This habit of mind is the geographic perspective on how the world works, including how systems function, how and why certain relationships exist, and also how we might approach and solve problems.  How can we cultivate spatial thinking?  That, friends, is the subject of many of the essays that appear in this blog, from pedagogical strategies to specific skills and technologies used.  What could be our measure of success?  If we can identify key points in the educational curriculum where spatial thinking can enhance what and how we are teaching, and in those points, to put spatial thinking skills into practice, then I think we have succeeded. What is your definition of spatial thinking?   When, where, and how do you think spatial thinking should be put into practice? ... View more

I recently participated in the European Association of Geographers conference in Belgium.  There, I had the pleasure of interacting with energetic and knowledgeable young professionals promoting the European Geography Association for Students and Young Geographers, the EGEA. Some members of the European Geography Association, with Karl Donert above left, President of the European Association of Geographers. It is an honor for Esri to partner with and support this organization, along with our colleagues at the University of Utrecht and elsewhere.  The goal of EGEA's network is to exchange knowledge and information for geography students and young geographers. To achieve this goal, EGEA organises congresses, student exchanges, hosts foreign students, and publishes a newsletter. As all of us in the field of geotechnology are well aware, networking is critical for success.  But what is also critical is empowering students and young professionals as they begin their careers in this field.  How can we as the geography and GIS professsional community best do that? Associations such as the EGEA can help grow an effective geo-workforce of tomorrow through development of skills, confidence, and, in short, cultivating lifelong learning and career growth.  Also playing a key role are resources such as the new GeoPivot and the Geomentor program.  But I also think effective nurturing starts at earlier ages, reflected in the efforts that we and others are making in such programs as 4H, the National Girls Collaborative Project, and other after school programs, and through working directly with primary and secondary students and educators.  We have numerous complicated issues to solve in the 21st Century, and most of these issues have a geographic component that can be understood through the use of geotechnologies.  These young people with whom we are working are skilled, committed, and eager to make a positive difference in our world. Are you involved in any of these efforts to help build the next generation of geo-minded professionals?   What other efforts do you think our community needs to make? ... View more

In my last post, I made the case that Jukes, McCain, Crocket, and Prensky's book Understanding the Digital Generation holds key lessons for those of us who are involved in teaching with GIS and teaching about GIS.  Yet the characteristics of these digital learners that I described in that post are not the only instructive elements of the book.  The authors' discussion of changes in the 21 st  Century world of work I believe are helpful for curriculum developers, instructors, and administrators who seek to embed the geographic perspective, spatial content, and geotechnology skills into instruction at all levels. Jukes et al. say that to prepare for the 21st Century world of work, while we will continue to teach many traditional skills, there will be a shift in emphasis on the importance of those skills.   The authors go on to say that we must adjust teaching to match the new world of technology.  New skills must be considered as part of the basic literacy skills of any student.  Why have these skills received a promotion? Quite simply, because of technology. Student discussing GIS based project. The authors prefer the word "fluency" over literacy because for them it conveys a sense of lifelong learning, such as becoming fluent in a language--in this case, the language of technology.  There are five types of fluencies that are important:  (1) Solution fluency:  This is 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, in short, I have witnessed thousands of times over the past 20 years that students doing so engage in all five of these fluencies.  Using GIS has never "just been about the tools" but rather engages and depends upon creativity, collaborative problem-solving, accessing and using data online and in the field, working with a wide variety of media from spreadsheets to geodatabases to image files to HTML and JavaScript, assessing an increasing array of spatial data sources, and communicating process and results.  Jukes et al.'s statement that "Students must be able to artistically create stories using technology" seems to capture a large part of what students do with GIS.  The communication may include verbal and written descriptions of the problem tackled, the creation of a story map, ArcGIS Online presentations, embedding a map as part of a descriptive web page, and a myriad of other methods.  All of this prepares students well for the 21st Century world of work. My question for instructors:  How have you observed students acquiring these five fluencies when you have taught GIS?  My question for students:  How has using GIS enabled you to prepare for the world of work? ... View more

I recently read the book Understanding the Digital Generation by Ian Jukes, Ted McCain, Lee Crockett, and Mark Prensky.  I found it to be insightful but also quite appropriate for those involved with GIS in education. Understanding the Digital Generation book. What are the characteristics of digital learners according to these authors?  Digital learners prefer receiving information quickly from multiple multimedia sources, not a slow and controlled release of information from limited sources.  GIS has always been about layering of information from a variety of sources, from satellite imagery to stream gauges, from traffic cams to ecological monitoring stations, and more.  Digital learners prefer processing pictures, sounds, color, and video before text.  Digital learners prefer random access to hyperlinked multimedia information, rather than receiving information linearly, logically, and sequentially.  GIS easily incorporates audio, video, photographs, links, and text.   Furthermore, GIS has become a platform, accessible from a variety of devices--tablets, laptops, smartphones--and the maps and data sets created within a GIS are shareable. Digital learners refer to network simultaneously with others, rather than working independently first before they network and interact with each other.  Whether in education, health, natural resource management, planning, or in other fields, success with GIS is greatly enhanced by networking with peers. Jukes et al. say that while many educators prefer teaching "just in case", digital learners prefer learning "just in time."  We in GIS in education have always emphasized using the most appropriate tools for the job, and learning GIS functions in the context of solving specific problems. Digital learners prefer instant gratification and immediate rewards.  Those of us who labored through the early days of GIS marvel at how easy-to-use modern GIS has become.  From creating spatial statistics to georegistering historical imagery, the modern GIS toolkit is vast and varied, accompanied by graphics, videos, and other resources designed to aid beginner and advanced users alike.    Finally, digital learners prefer learning that is relevant, active, instantly useful, and fun.  How can GIS, which was created to analyze 21st Century issues from energy to water to migration to natural hazards and more, not be relevant and useful?  Teaching and learning with GIS is active, engaging, and yes, fun. In short, I firmly believe that teaching and learning with GIS appeals to and is relevant to today's digital learners.  Can you find additional connect points between these authors' statements and GIS in education? ... View more

Technologies that enable educators and students to map their field-collected data are rapidly evolving.  A few years ago I wrote several reports of my field test that compared the spatial accuracy of collecting tracks and waypoints with a recreational grade GPS versus a smartphone.  I decided it was time to revisit that research and recently while working with faculty at the Mt Evans Outdoor Education Lab School in Colorado, the opportunity arose. While on the school's grounds I collected data simultaneously with three methods and two devices:  (1) As a track using an app called RunKeeper on my smartphone (an iPhone 4 in my case), (2) As a track and waypoints using an app called Motion X GPS on my smartphone, (3) As a track and waypoints using my Garmin 76 GPS receiver.  In order to keep my footing on the steep terrain, I simply held these devices in front of me; I did not hold them above my head or in any way enhance the reception.  After the collection was completed, I emailed the smartphone data as GPX files to myself and uploaded them into ArcGIS Online.  I cabled the points from my GPS device to my computer using the free Minnesota DNR GPS program and mapped them as a zipped shapefile.  I saved the results in ArcGIS Online as a web map. Comparing smartphone and GPS tracks and waypoints. As expected, the RunKeeper track, shown in pale blue, was highly generalized.  RunKeeper is a fitness app that I use daily with excellent accuracy, but I suspect the generalization here occurred in the step when I downloaded the track to a GPX file and mapped the GPX.   However, both the Motion X GPS track collected with the  smartphone and the track collected with the GPS receiver were only 1 to 2 meters off from where the satellite image showed the trails to be.  And keep in mind that this model of GPS is already a decade old; the chips in the newer models can even detect GPS signals inside certain types of buildings.  In addition, my smartphone is nearly three years old. Interestingly, at certain places, such as just west of where the popup graphic is located, the smartphone results were better, but south of the graphic, where I left the trail to photograph a bench, the GPS detected my side journey but not the smartphone.  I also took photographs in the field with my smartphone and uploaded them to Picasaweb.  I then accessed the photos in Picasaweb and captured the latitude-longitude coordinates, and used those coordinates to map them in ArcGIS Online.  The photographs also were no more than 1 meter off of the location I had taken them according to the satellite image. I was very pleased with the smartphone and GPS results, particularly because the school lies in steep and heavily forested terrain in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  If I achieved good results here, the results should be even better in flat terrain and with fewer trees.   And while there are still some advantages for using GPS receivers in education, the smartphones are a viable technology for doing so, and they too offer advantages.  I will expand on the advantages of both in future blog essays, and keep in mind that smartphone location services can use GPS, cellular triangulation, and geo-wifi, or a combination thereof, and you as the user typically do not know which one(s) it is using at any particular moment.  The takeaway here is that GPS and smartphones both do a fine job in terms of spatial accuracy.  True, I wasn't mapping fiber optic cables, but for marking trees, bird's nests, trails, and a host of other items that educators and students want to map, they are quite suitable. How do you use GPS receivers and smartphones in your educational work?  How might you use this type of spatial accuracy comparison as part of your math, science, or geography-based curriculum? ... View more

In a recent essay, I asked “Is Everyone a Geographer?,”given 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 and geographers.  I received some intriguing responses as did a book in which my colleagues and I asked this same question, entitled Practicing Geography.   In the essay I contended that geography is a three-legged stool, with supporting legs representing content knowledge, geographic skills, and the spatial perspective. The advent of geotechnologies has elevated the importance of geography to a level unprecedented in the history of the discipline, reinvoking inherent tensions between the integrity of the field 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—some say that geography has never been more prominent within the everyday human experience than it is today. Personally, I’m not so sure about that.  We spend so much time indoors these days.  At one time we were all directly depending on the landscape for food, water, and shelter, we were very much attuned to local geography—where to plant, where not to plant, where the safe drinking water was, where we could set animal traps or fishing lures, and other actions that our very lives depended on.  That has changed for many, though certainly not all, of the planet’s inhabitants.  In the past, the ability to use “geographic data” depended on one’s five senses.  I suppose we could have a lively debate on whether geography is more prominent in the human experience now or in the past.  What is clear that the 21 st Century certainly has seen society’s valuing geographic tools in everyday life.  This is different in many ways from the previous 100 years, where the ability to use geographic data, in the form of increasingly sophisticated paper maps, and later, databases and software, did require extensive geographic training.  Now, many of these tools are as common as the smartphone or the Internet itself. The rise of geographic tools such as web GIS, GPS, data collection via smartphone, and easy-to-use GIS software means that we now have the capability of making decisions more rapidly and more wisely than ever before, and most importantly, use the spatial perspective in making those decisions.   Geotechnologies have no curricular “home” in most educational systems at the present time.  Thus, one challenge in education is convincing educational authorities and organizations, and even individual educators and parents, that these geographic tools enhance teaching and learning at all levels.  They are valuable tools with which to learn history, earth and environmental science, biology, geography, mathematics, language arts, and many other subjects, encouraging holistic and critical thinking.   However, they are also valuable to learn for their own sake, as technologies for an ever-expanding array of careers, from medicine to marketing, from engineering to ecology, from business to biology, from public safety to planning. How can we connect the rise of geographic tools to the need to be using these tools throughout the educational system? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

As we enter a new year, we on the Esri education team look forward to working with you, the global GIS education community, on supporting the use of spatial thinking and geotechnologies to foster deep learning experiences throughout the world.  A Chinese proverb, “Ji Hua Mei You Bian Hua Kuai” or “Ji hua gan bu shan bian hua” seems appropriate to quote as we move forward as a community.  Ji hua refers to plans, bian hua to changes, and mei you means “not”.  The meaning of the proverb is, therefore, “Plans Can't Keep Up with Changes.” Many nuances associated with this proverb seem to me to be particularly meaningful with regards to GIS in education.  First and most obvious is that change is a constant part of our lives.  The world of public and private education at all levels is rapidly changing in terms of priorities, learners’ demographics, and available technologies and methods.  Teaching and learning with GIS is also rapidly transforming as GIS becomes viable on mobile devices and web-based maps, apps, and services continue to open doors through which students can enter for learning opportunities in schools and universities and career opportunities once they graduate from those schools and universities.  The open data movement, citizen science, and cloud-based GIS all expanded many-fold last year and will continue to do so.  The recent upgrade to ArcGIS Online, including the viewing and filtering of tables and the ability to create time-enabled feature services, is a perfect example of the expanding array of tools that can be effectively used to teach in and about a wide variety of subjects, students, and settings. But I believe there are subtler aspects to this proverb that are appropriate to GIS in education as well.  While things may happen that are out of our control, we still need a plan to keep us focused.  We on the Esri education team will continue to develop courses, curriculum, data, and other resources, conduct and foster professional development opportunities and research on GIS in education, and communicate through a variety of face to face and online methods and a variety of stakeholders about the need for spatial thinking and GIS in education.  We do all of these things in partnership with you, the GIS education community.  Adhering to the proverb also means that we need to prepare for and predict upcoming changes as we create our plan, and so we need to keep close watch on and anticipate changes in technologies and education.  Finally, following the proverb also means that our plan needs to include long-term and short-term  goals, and include step-by-step details to deal with the changes that will surely come.   We need to hold fast to our “big dreams” of spatially literate societies, and yet take concrete steps to help us get there. What plans do you have for GIS in education over the next year? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

 Earlier this year, I created a map in ArcGIS Online showing the location of selected abandoned buildings in Detroit.  A book entitled Lost Detroit features stories that the author, Dan Austin, wrote to accompany each of the grim but fascinating photographs of these modern day ruins taken by Sean Doerr.  These include the Grand Central Railroad Terminal Building, the Michigan Theatre that is now a parking garage, the Grand Old Army of the Republic building, the Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, and many more. Why did I create this map?  I have always been fascinated by maps and believe that mapping is a natural way to tell a story.  Detroit, and indeed all cities, are dynamic entities that have a unique and interesting story to tell.  ArcGIS Online also allows for the easy integration of multimedia elements to tell a story, and I created popups from online photographs of the selected buildings that ArcGIS Online easily geocoded.  Lastly, I wanted to see the spatial distribution of these buildings, which I could only do by mapping them.  As expected, many of them are downtown, but the Vanity Ballroom and others are scattered throughout the core metropolitan area.  This project illustrated the dynamic nature of the built landscape:  Since the book was published, I discovered that one of the buildings featured in the book, the old Cass Technical High School building, had been torn down. Earlier this month, I went further and created an Esri StoryMap that allowed a rich integration of maps, text, and images.  The StoryMaps templates are easy to modify to suit your objectives.  I created this StoryMap, and another one that shows changes in landscapes, climate, and land use along 40 Degrees North Latitude, by modifying just two of the Esri-provided files, and then moving these two files along with the other required files and folders to a web server. What places in your community are important enough to map?  What buildings or other landmarks in your community do you believe are important enough to protect, and why?  How might you use ArcGIS Online or Esri StoryMaps to tell a story about your community and its landmarks? -Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more

During a workshop I attended at the Esri User Conference this past summer, my colleague Charlie Frye stated that “a good map teaches you to ask a better question.”   I love this statement.  It fits well with the mission of the GIS education community, don’t you think?  Isn’t one of our main goals in teaching and learning with GIS to use maps and data to investigate our communities, our regions, our countries, and our world?  A question is the first step in an investigation.  It is the first step in the geographic inquiry process.  Whether the question is “What is the relationship between birth rate and life expectancy around the globe?” or “How did the construction of the breakwater change the rate of coastal erosion along this stretch of beach?” or “Why were communities along the path of Superstorm Sandy affected differently?”, these questions form the foundation of our investigations.  Good questions inevitably get refined and modified along the way and usually lead to other questions.  They may not be fully answered, and oftentimes have no single correct answer.   This may be puzzling at first to students but emulates real-world decision-making. In this activity, students determine the optimal route for a tourist bus through Manhattan given specified points of interest and the location of the tour bus garage. As important as good questions are, it is sometimes amazing how little time we spend in our educational system helping students practice asking good questions.  Perhaps it is because in this age of standardized testing, we are so focused on good answers.  Yet many educators are indeed helping students ask questions, and not just any questions, but thoughtful questions that can lead to increased understanding, skill building, and critical thinking. Teaching with GIS and teaching about GIS foster good questioning.  One of the core functions of a GIS is to allow for real-world issues to be examined, questioned, and probed with real data.  Maps in a GIS environment allow for the many spatial and temporal dimensions of our world to be examined, at multiple scales.  Not only are the questions able to be grappled with using rich sets of maps and data, but they are tied to real-world events past and present.  They are interesting, but they are also important and relevant for our future, including such issues as sustainable agriculture, natural hazard management, smart city planning, and much more.   Maps inside a GIS environment help students of all ages to ask better questions in part because during the inquiry, they allow for the scale and symbology to be changed, for additional layers to be added, and for powerful queries and statistics to be run on the data.  The “what if” questions can be explored, such as:  What  if I changed the scale?  What if I added this variable?  What if I ran a different query?  What if I examined a different area with the same variables?  What if I classified the data differently?  ArcGIS provides a platform for asking and analyzing questions. What questions do you have about our world?  How can GIS help you grapple with those questions, find answers, or ask additional questions? - Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager ... View more