Oswego County’s (New York) 911 system is getting an upgrade: the database will soon include “point locations” for driveways courtesy of students in the Hannibal Central School District. Says teacher Greg Bailey, at Kenney Middle School, who worked with the students “I wanted to experience what the kids were experiencing. It isn’t difficult but it is tedious.” Should Middle Schoolers be trusted on such tedious work?
- WRVO
The inaugural ArcGIS Summer Training Camp at West Virginia University in Morgantown, co-sponsored by the state Department of Education and the West Virginia Geographic Alliance is the first of its kind for West Virginia elementary and secondary educators. The camp is scheduled for July 26-30 and will give educators the opportunity to “master geographic information systems (GIS) technology.”
- Herald Dispatch
Members of the GeospatialLearning@PrimarySchool project recently returned from a successful “OLPC camp” in Kigali, Ruanda. During a 2 week period, they tested a learning module “Geo” for the XO laptop at the Kagugu Primary School. The “Geo” module is a simple framework which enables one to program spatial-related activities. The Geocaching and Geotagging functions were implemented and the objects of the testing. ...
52°North, the Institute for Geoinformatics and its education initiative GI@School, together with ESRI Germany initiated the GeospatialLearning@PrimarySchool project in September 2009. The project’s objective is to develop XO-Laptop applications which foster geospatial thinking by using novel Information Technologies. Primary schools, in particular the social science and geography classes, in Ruanda and Germany have been targeted to test the applications. The “geospatial” aspect plays an important role in the development of XO activities as a means to playfully learn basic concepts like position, direction, distance.
- via 52°North Newsletter
Michal Isaacson, a doctoral student working with Dr. Noam Shoval of the Geography Department at the Hebrew University, has been involved in developing new approaches to the use of advanced tracking technologies in order to provide valuable data collection and analysis for later study and application or even for on-the-spot, real-time application.
Her work has implications for understanding the activity of people in different settings, such as urban areas, shopping malls, theme parks, national parks and other tourist attractions. It has already been tested to evaluate crowd activity and flow at the Port Aventura theme park in Spain.
For her research, Isaacson has been named the first prize winner among students in this year’s competition for the Kaye Innovation Awards at the Hebrew University. The prizes were presented on June 9 at the university’s Board of Governors meeting. Her work in this field has resulted in a book that she coauthored together with Dr. Shoval and in several articles published in leading geographic journals. The first article she coauthored and that was published in The Professional Geographer was noted by the journal as one of the top five most cited articles in 2006-2007.
Isaccson attended our LI conference last year and unfortunately the interview I did with her was not of good enough quality to share.
- press release
