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.
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.”
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.)
