Geospatial resources for schools

Last week I was invited to give a talk on GIS, mapmaking and spatial analysis at my local school. To help me prepare, I asked people on Twitter for ideas – and the response was overwhelming. Friends, colleagues and complete strangers were kind of enough to share their thoughts and resources through a flood of public and private messages.

In the end I was able to use only a tiny fraction of the material, as my talk was just 30 minutes long. Therefore, to preserve all this knowledge for future reference, I’ve listed below everything people sent me. Feel free to steal my slides and anything else from this page for your local school – or add more stuff in the comments below.

It's a rather long list. Strap yourselves in…

My slides

Can be found on Slideshare – includes an introduction to GIS and mapmaking, projections, applications, spatial analysis and careers. As this talk was aimed at maths students I also created a section on spatial maths. I heard some people had trouble downloading the PowerPoint file (30MB) and could only access the PDF. Any problems, let me know. The PPT includes a couple of animated GIFs.

On presentation delivery

The attention span of the average teenager is shorter than what we might be used to with a professional audience (or maybe not), so @mildthing99 recommended dividing the presentation into short, bitesize sections of no more than 5 minutes each (also known as "small steps" in educational parlance). I did this and it worked extremely well. I also included an interactive task to keep students engaged (draw a world map by hand).

For further info on delivery this article on focused learning may be helpful.

@Silver7Mapping also warns against giving a talk before 11 in the morning, as many teenagers won’t be fully awake until then ?? Luckily mine was at lunchtime.

Curriculum topics and GIS use cases

Changing Places is an important curriculum topic, so try Digimap for Schools (subscription needed) or the National Library of Scotland's map website which is excellent (covering all of Britain), e.g. try the transparency overlay and spy facility. As @mildthing99 advises, this is useful to show places in the past such as Heathrow, Milton Keynes, motorways and other large features which will have changed across decades. He has created a lot of GIS resources around this for schools, try e.g. his story map.

The Royal Geographical Society provides lots of resources for schools, especially case studies for geographical issues. Their head of Education @SteveBraceGeog is also worth following for the latest news and resources. (via @bakerangela)

Similarly, Ordnance Survey provides many educational resources, especially around map reading and spatial analysis. (via @rollohome)

The second chapter of the third edition (2011) of the GIS bible, Geographic Information Systems and Science (by Longley, Goodchild, Maguire and Rhind), features a nice “Gallery of Applications” i.e. GIS use cases. Sadly the latest edition from 2015 has no such gallery in a single chapter, but applications are spread throughout the book. – via @0mgould

(UPDATE 22Dec19: In addition to Longley et al, for further GIS use cases @KatyAppletonUAE recommends Esri's book Women and GIS for a very accessible, varied and inspiring set of case studies)

For a more current affairs angle, @abi_edin suggests using topical news stories to fire up students about GIS and geography. You could simply pick news stories with an obvious geospatial angle (i.e. most of them…) and use various forms of mapping to make sense of them.

You could also use a fictional crisis scenario (perhaps inspired by MapAction), and let students work through the information they would require to deal with the incident, and how this would be drawn on a local basemap.

Or you could simply take a nice map you recently made into school, and tell the story around it (as @azolnai tried, with success). Alternatively take someone else’s map – e.g. from a news website – and ask the students to critique it (as suggested by @cartocraftsman).

Online GIS maps

ArcGIS Online is an excellent resource providing free cloud-based GIS for all schools in the UK. Find out more at https://schools.esriuk.com/. There’s also some videos on the importance of maps (via @DhowalDalal).

To get started, Esri’s Head of Education (@GIS4Schools) recommends the Beginner’s guide to ArcGIS Online for teachers and students. If interested he can also make available survey tutorials and resources for students to do in the field e.g. based on IMD data and preconceptions of deprivation.

Weather and climate are a major topic in every regard. Moving maps like windy.com or earth.nullschool.net are veritable GIS systems in their own right, providing lots of tools and options to play with and educate students in immediate and entertaining ways.

In the air

Aviation is always a fun topic. NATS, the UK’s air traffic control service has some stories and resources on their website https://www.nats.aero/discover/ as suggested by @Seabourn19 (who I believe was an air traffic controller before he fell into GIS!)

Live trackers like flightradar24.com also provide great fun and insights. For example you can tell how connected or developed certain economies are just by looking at flight patterns. Flight Radar is also great for live plane spotting.

Flight paths on maps often bewilder people – why don’t aircraft fly in straight line? Because of the map projection, of course. Here’s another site that explains this phenomenon.

Drones are all the rage these days. Here and here are examples of 3D models built with drones and visualised in Pix4D (use Ctrl to rotate 3D) – courtesy of @Lene_Fischer.

Aerial images are always popular. @AubriGIS recommends taking printed aerial images to school and have the students identify different places (e.g. Egypt with the pyramids, Paris, their own school, local places of interest). The hardcopies allow students to work in groups around tables, which is more fun than staring at screens.

Mapmaking

To explain map projections @PhilipDellar suggests drawing the outline of continents on an orange, then peel it and lay the pieces flat. You will see shock on students’ faces when they don’t recognise the result compared to the Mercator view we all know. A great opener to an explanation of projections. (Or if you don’t have an orange, use my slides. Alternatively, the 'flight paths on a map' example above may also be useful).

Cartographic guru @John_M_Nelson recommends this video explaining 5 Tips for Making Maps that Captivate and Communicate. This includes a useful Excel map hack. The video should help de-mystify geography and the tools we use to understand it.

Here is a great set of slides on maps and mapmaking: Maps: Exploring the Unknown. They’re in Spanish but might be worth translating. Source on GitHub – courtesy of @xurxosanz.

To get more hands-on, @EarlstonBoho, @Silver7Mapping and @Ssje1S suggest a number of outdoor or physical activities for students:

• Build Lego hills from contour maps.
• Draw a map for a relative from their house to the shops, showing the route, distance and other dimensions e.g. cost of travel.
• Build or draw a historical model or map of the local village/town and how it looks today.
• Make a map of the school courtyard or playground, using an A4 sheet of paper (or their own feet) for scale to map out distances and features.
• For a bit of land survey practice, get some cheap builders’ tape measures and get students to set out one or more 3x3 m squares on the floor. Using bits of bluetac to mark corners, use the tapes to work out how to check that the square is actually square (hint: Pythagoras…)

Historical maps through time

Old maps are always popular, advise @Kristinstweets and @NiChNi. This is especially the case if they cover the local area that students recognise. It is always fascinating to see how a place has changed through time. Note, historical mapping can include maps, aerial photography and satellite imagery (the latter going back some 40 years now e.g. Landsat).

Historical maps aren’t always easy to get hold off, although in the UK there are a number of commercial suppliers offering full coverage going back 150 years or more – see e.g. promap.co.uk, old-maps.co.uk or myhistoricmap.co.uk. (disclosure: years ago I worked for Landmark, which owns the Promap brand).

You can search for free historical maps from Ordnance Survey at the National Archives. The National Library of Scotland also provides historical maps, including these of England and Wales. Maybe Digimaps has historical maps as well (UPDATE 22Dec19: Digimaps confirmed that they DO have historical mapping!).

ArcGIS Online provides historical maps around the world, which are probably worth checking out too.

And finally

Take cookies! According to @Silver7Mapping you’ll instantly be best friends with the students ??

Thanks again to everyone who contributed! Feel free to add any other ideas, comments or corrections below.