Using Balloon Kits to Capture Imagery and other Education GIS News

 Harrisburg University student Steve Cline is using a balloon to capture imagery of a local island. The big issue in using these kits: helium shortage. Maybe it's time for kites!

- Penn Live

A new Kindle book (the authors refer to it as a manual) titled Gaining Competency With GIS: How-to Manual for ArcGIS Desktop Version 10 [Kindle Edition] offers help in gaining competency with ArcGIS. It references the ArcGIS 10 docs and I gather provides step by step instructions for tools and extensions. It claims to be based on the Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM) but refers to the that document as "Geotechnical Competency Model" throughout. I wonder if that editing error is in part related to an English class cited in the acknowledgements.

via URISA Digest

Students with the Paragould High School EAST Lab Program [AR] are using their computer knowledge to help Paragould Police monitor sex offenders living in the city limits.

"They are updating our sex offender zoning map," said Captain Greg Trout with PPD.

- KAIT

The University of Redlands has received a $75,000 grant from the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to develop a Spatial Decision Support (SDS) system that calculates and maps the potential impacts of energy projects on wildlife.

- press release

EAST Students Map Hospital and other Education GIS News

By request from the local SWAT team, students in the EAST Lab Program at Paragould High School [AR] are working on a huge project. They are constructing digitized maps, floor-by-floor, of a local hospital to better assist officers in handling an emergency situation.

- KAIT

Complaints from parents about schools manipulating the distance from home to school to give preference to some students in some schools has led a few schools to use Google Maps as a measurement tool.

“It’s the most transparent way to ascertain the distance between the school and the residence of a child. We have also adopted other methods including taking a declaration from the parents over their claims of the distance,” [Ashok] Pandey [principal of Ahlcon International School in Mayur Vihar] told PTI.

The tool used for the measurement and if the measurement is crow flies or along roads is not clear.

- FirstPost

Darren and Sandy Van Soye will spend the next 14 months travelling the world and teaching geography per a press release from Pricess Cruises.

The couple, who are chronicling their journey at www.TrekkingthePlanet.net, were inspired to plan their trek after they saw first-hand what a positive impact a previous family trip around the globe had on their two daughters' lives. Their full travel itinerary incorporates five different Princess Cruises voyages, totaling 96 days at sea. Both the first and last legs of their journey, plus three legs in between, will be aboard a Princess cruise ship.  ...

In total, the Van Soyes' journey will cover 50 countries on six continents over the course of the 424-day world tour. Throughout their travels, the couple will share 60 different geography education modules they have created as well as pictures and videos of their travels for anyone in the world to use. So far more than 700 classrooms around the world will be following their travels, representing 50,000 students.

Would you use such a resource in your teaching?

- press release

The Geographical Sciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy aims to support the development of geographical studies throughout the island of Ireland. Following on from this we are pleased to provide an introductory resource [pdf] on the geography of climate justice prepared by the Committee (with support from the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency) for dissemination to geography students across Ireland. The resource is intended for use with transition year students in the Republic and for students from GCSE level upwards in Northern Ireland. 

Royal Irish Academy via @theaag

Paper Maps are Hard to Use and other Education GIS News

At Holt Elementary in Durham, NC, the local GIS users are teaching about GIS via Google Earth. I'm not sure how I feel about this exercise:

To illustrate the difference that GIS technology makes, [GIS analyst from the GIS division of the city’s Technology Solutions Department, Robert] Cushman asked the students to locate their homes or school on paper maps within 30 seconds. They hunched over the maps, furiously searching for familiar street names or landmarks. At the end of the 30 seconds, just one student said he’d located his home.

“Now we don’t use maps like this anymore – very rarely,” Cushman said. “The maps we work with are made to be easy to use” – like traffic maps on morning TV newscasts and those used by vehicle navigation systems. 

- Herald Sun

Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas are developing an emergency communications network that will maintain operation during natural disasters and provide critical warnings and geographic information to people affected by the disasters. The researchers are honing and testing the system now and expect to deploy a pilot network at the end of 2012.

Geo challenges include how to arrange the "mesh" network that enables the network and running GIS on low power devices. The work is funded by an NSF grant.

- press release

- project page

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Massachusetts, Boston (UMB) have created a detailed map (and accompanying study) of where terrorism attacks have occurred since 1970. 

...while certain areas (those surrounding Manhattan and Los Angeles, for example) have endured as terror 'hot spots' throughout the study, others have come and go. In the 2000s, for example, there has been a higher-than-average rate of attacks in Maricopa County, AZ, Phoenix's county. King County, WA, on the other hand, was a terror hot spot in the 1970s and 1980s, but has been largely quiet since.

- HuffPo

- press release