Creating and Conducting Guest Presentations for Students

[JosephKerski]

A question that is raised frequently on blogs, forums, and listservs is from professionals who are asked to conduct a presentation for a group of students, in a colloquium, after-school program, or in a primary, secondary, or university level classroom. Some school districts and universities have a “visiting scientist program” that matches instructors with outside professionals, while elsewhere it is done more informally upon request. In the GIS field, GIS professionals are often asked to conduct presentations for students, and these requests often peak near GIS Day each November.  I would like to give my philosophy on these presentations, and look forward to hearing your ideas and experiences. Over the course of my career, I have visited over 600 educational institutions to give guest presentations, but the following reflections are by no means “one size fits all”: I am continuously learning as I go.

1.  Find out as much as you can from the students' instructor so that you can make sure that your language is at the appropriate level and that you are meeting the goals of the instructor in whatever course they are teaching.  Does your presentation need to be more technical, or less so?  Either way, make sure that you mention frequently the higher, more noble goals about why you are using GIS in non-jargon terms:  You are ensuring that the community will have open space in the future, or safe water to drink, or that the electrical grid can withstand a freeze, or that invasive species will be held in check, or whatever it may be. 

2.  Move beyond the phrase “guest lecture” or “presentation."  Please!   Particularly in a visual and exciting field such as GIS, approaching it as “lecture” will severely limit your effectiveness. Yes, I have lots of story maps on careers as do my colleagues that you can find on https://www.arcgis.com by searching for example on "career owner:jjkerski" (without the quotes).  I hope these are useful.   But make it your own voice.  In addition, you have wonderful GIS tools and data at your fingertips and complex, fascinating problems that you are grappling with on a daily basis. Therefore, show what you are working on!  Show your data or success stories you have made available to the public on the web.

3.  Don't just show your own projects, as wonderful as your wastewater treatment solution or your demographic analysis is (!).  Please make it as interactive as possible!  Remember, you are teaching and inspiring, not just giving a presentation.  Ask questions and show how you use GIS to solve problems. Don’t just show a bunch of slides if you really want to engage the students. If you’re in a lab or students have a laptop, tablet, or phone, even better—-have the students investigate your maps for themselves. Some students may consider geographic inquiry to be simply asking where something is. Therefore, you might have to provide some foundation about what spatial thinking and spatial analysis in a GIS is all about--the whys of where-- change over space and time.  Or, what's where, why is it there, and why should we care.

4.  Think about the neighborhood and region where you are giving your presentation. What issues such as natural hazards, graffiti, rapid growth, traffic, or water quality are of concern? What makes this neighborhood unique? Think of the landscape, ecoregion, land use, river systems, climate, ethnicity, history, and other characteristics at work. Sometimes, students consider their neighborhood to be the most boring in the world, so help them consider what sets it apart, showing their neighborhood via GIS and another across town or in another city across the country or on another continent.

Use ArcGIS Online to compare earthquakes around the world to plate boundaries and cities. Examine median age by tract and block group and discuss the implications that the median age has on different service industries. Compare land use and ecoregions and ask why agriculture occurs where it does. Go for the unusual by examining strange or puzzling locations or phenomena using imagery or choropleth or dot density maps.   Show 10 satellite images of selected places around the world or around your state and have students guess as to where they are, why, and what the area is like. Investigate landforms or features and ask students to tell you what each one of them is, whether sand dunes, wetland, karst, a golf course, school, office building, or hospital.  Show some cutting edge GIS too, like 3D analytics and Geo AI!  Show a map and ask "is this median income in your community, median age, or the diversity index"?   And then spend time investigating before you tell them the correct answer.   But also pose some problems where there IS no correct answer, including difficult choices that must be made in your community and in entire regions around energy, water, or hazard resilience, for example.  Keep asking:  Why are these spatial patterns like they are?  In ArcGIS Online, you can prepare this ahead of time or construct it while you are talking with the students. 

5.  If you cannot show any of the data that you are working on for privacy reasons or because your data are too large to effectively show online, then use other related data that work anywhere, such as ArcGIS Online or related tools such as story maps. Display different satellite images taken in different years to compare land use change in the community.   I have done this in Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur, the UAE, and in many other places around the world where I have taught.   Use the Landsat Explorer app to examine changes in the Aral Sea or along the Florida coast over the past 30 years. Use other Living Atlas of the World apps, too, such as Wayback imagery and the Drought Aware app, as I explain here.  Choose at least one local issue and one global issue and discuss the “whys of where.”  Begin by asking students what they care about and connect it to your workshop.  Teach something in the news today with maps and show how relevant maps are to everyday decision making and issues.  I and some of my colleagues call this the GeoNews (here is more information) and here is one example I created around the wildfires of 2024.

6.  If you can, get outside for a bit on the school grounds with some cameras and set up a Survey123, or even use GPS receivers.  Collect information on recycling bins, tree condition, cable boxes, weather, noise, or something else.  Link the resulting photographs and videos to ArcGIS Online, and then help students tell their own stories, as I do with walkable neighborhoods, here.

7.  Tell your personal story about how you blazed your career path in GIS, touching on the importance of staying in school and pursuing a well-rounded education including courses in science, geography, mathematics, computers, and language arts.

8. Again, don’t forget to ask the students questions as well. You will be inspired and energized! And, hopefully the students will be too. 

9.  Leave a poster or some fun objects (pens, stickers) reminding students what you do or what GIS is. Other ideas abound on this Esri community education blog and on the GIS Day resource area.

10.  If you can instill some curiosity about their world, and the value and power of real data, maps, and GIS technology, then you will have succeeded.  I can remember guest presentations from way back in my middle school days, all these years later.  You may have similar remembrances.  Your workshop can really have a big impact on many students.   Don't be discouraged if the students are quiet.  Use those silent moments to have them think deeply:  Don't feel that you need to fill in every moment with a statement (this took me several years to learn how to do well!).

What presentation will you give to students this year?  I look forward to your comments. 

- Joseph Kerski, Esri Education Manager