Monday, November 23. 2009

Quote of the Week

"Our teachers are not requesting (maps) anymore. They're saying, 'Please take them away. They're cluttering up our space.' "

- Oak Brooks' Butler School District 53 (Illinois) Superintendent Sandra Martin explaining how teachers in her district often ask to clear away the pull-down maps and make space for a white board that would display maps digitally instead, in a Chicago Tribune article about using online vs. pull-down maps in K-12 education.

Tuesday, November 17. 2009

Podcast: The Line Between Geo Amateur and Professional

If anyone can make a map today, what is it that distinguishes the amateur from the professional when it comes to geospatial? Is it training? Perspective? Tools? Our editors weigh in.

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Tuesday, November 10. 2009

Education Tidbits

Two graduate assistantships are available at the University of California, Santa Barbara on an NSF-funded project using remote sensing, GIS, and computer models to study land use and coupled urban systems. These are PhD positions.

- Environmental Research Web

Engineering students at UC San Diego played a critical role in helping the university and the San Diego region secure a total of $154 million in federal bonds for solar installation projects. What did they do? They put together a tool for prospective users of solar installs to calculate cost, energy output, and payback time of solar arrays, data required for the bonds.

"What we did was put addresses into Google Earth and used satellite images to calculate the areas of the rooftops and parking lots where local applicants wanted to install solar panels. We then used an online tool called PVWatts Solar Calculator to help calculate the expected annual output, and a spreadsheet we designed calculated the 10-to-15-year payback of each installation project," explained Karl Olney, a second-year Ph.D. mechanical engineering student. "The thing that was nice for our projects was that with our tools an individual site's application could be completed in about 10 minutes.

Another bonus: high school interns were taught to use the system to help file applications.

- PhyOrg

A team from the University of Miami, University of El Paso and University of Rochester have employed Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) images compiled over a decade to study volcanic activity in the African Rift. The study, published in the November issue of Geology, studies the section of the rift in Kenya.

- InSciences

In what is perhaps the longest press release I've seen of late, Education Logistics touts the savings by school districts using its school bus routing app. The total savings is over $11 million by 9 school districts. No word on how much the 9 districts spent on the software, so there's no way to calculate an ROI (even on these handpicked likely high savings clients).

Tuesday, November 3. 2009

Education Tidbits

There are more and more places to learn GIS! You can now take a three course series on ArcGIS from the KeyBank Tacoma Professional Development Center. After completion you receive a certificate. It's run through the Univ Washington Tacoma. It's rather cost effective at about $2500.

California State University Northridge is updating a campus tree atlas that predates the big earthquake. Among the challenges? Tagging trees not appropriate for "nailed in" metal tags, student stealing tags, and identifying species.

- CSU Sundial

Get free teaching tools related to the upcoming census. The Census in Schools materials are available free online at www.census.gov/schools "for educators, students, parents, home-schoolers and the public. Teachers can use the lesson plans -- as they are or adapted as needed -- to teach a host of topics including mapping, math concepts, data literacy and civics."

- press release

Wednesday, October 28. 2009

Education Tidbits

GIS training is underway in Ghana's in Koforidua in the Eastern Region. About 20 Health Information Officers are learning about GIS use for medical delivery. All 21 district health directorates should be trained by next year. There's no discussion of the nature of access to the tool once training is over.

- Ghana Broadcasting System

The N.H. Police K-9 Academy meant well. It bought 15 GPS receivers, computers and mapping software, then figured out it didn't know to use them. "There's more to this GPS stuff than we'd realized. We started looking around for someone who could teach us to use the equipment," reports Mark Ericson, who chairs the board of the Working Dog Foundation, a nonprofit that founded, operates, maintains, and raises funds for the academy. That's good news for Shane Bradt, UNH Cooperative Extension geospatial technologies specialist. He's been tapped to "teach the academy trainers and some local K-9 police handlers to use hand-held GPS units to mark trails, collect information as their dogs attempt to follow a pre-laid scent trail, and map the collected information."

- Foster.com

Chris Castiglione has a valuable Google Maps/Earch in education post on his blog. While he is excited about using Google Maps to teach visualization, simulation and play, the examples are far more interesting to me in context of using GIS across the curriculum. (His paper is here in pdf.)

Friday, October 23. 2009

Quote of the Week

"It's like a big swap meet."

David Lanegran, chair of the Macalester geography department and the coordinator of the Minnesota Alliance for Geographic Education (MAGE) on GEOFEST to be held at Macalester on Saturday. The "conference is to bring together geography teachers, pre-service teachers and students planning on going into teaching, to exchange ideas and learn new techniques, strategies, and applications for teaching geography."

- The MAC Weekly