[Ica-osgeo-labs] Your ideas/inputs needed for empowering School teachers and expanding Geoeducation in Schools globally

[Suchith Anand]

Nikos,

Many thank you for this letter. I have copied your letter to email to the GeoforAll community, as i think your ideas/thoughts are very important and need to be discussed with the wider community.  In fact, it was AAG's related discussions last month and request from school teachers etc that got us to take action so we can support all school teachers  (all levels- primary, secondary etc) globally . In fact, that is the reason why we are having discussions in Como to expand "Geo for All" to schools globally and your email is very timely.

Even if we wanted to do this say 10 years back, we would not have been able to do this as we did not have the resources , but now we have our own fully customisable desktop GIS  QGIS (and better than any proprietary GIS!) and we can scale this to millions of schools globally and customise it as needed for various levels (primary, secondary education etc) and also into as many languages as we wish and this is worth billions of dollars of software donation from OSGeo Foundation for the global geoeducation mission   . We can also learn from gvSIG Batovi experiences etc as needed. We have MapStory for any webGIS based learning . More importantly we have strong team of universities worldwide who can provide any mentorship needed locally for the school teachers training. Also we want to welcome Government organisations, Industry and NGO's to join us in our mission as partners it will have multiplier effect. It is this unique combination of all these factors that give us an amazing opportunity  to make this happen.

With your 20 + years of expertise in Primary Education , you are the best one to lead this Primary education focus for us. May i request that you join Ela and Adrian in chairing our Teacher Training and School Education Thematic and give direction for this. Please let us start this project to bring school teachers around the world to discuss and build a “GIS pedagogy” for primary school. Please lead this for us .

All- i am forwarding Nikos letter on this as this is very important aspect of our future direction. My email[1]  yesterday was to make sure we start taking actions to support not just the  the school teachers  that have requested our support but all school teachers globally . Their empowerment is our mission.

In less than two weeks time at FOSS4G-Europe at Como we will have ICA, ISPRS and OSGeo Presidents and many of our colleagues meeting in the sidelines for the conference which is an great opportunity and  we will start putting actions to expand this theme. So as Nikos mentioned, it will be great if other members in our network can provide their  ideas/inputs.

Suchith


[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/ica-osgeo-labs/2015-July/001847.html




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Dear Suchith,

I follow the discussion on the matter of Education and I would like to add my point of view. 
My experience (21 years) is mainly in primary education and especially in evaluating and implementing methods for teaching geography in primary school. Since the beginning I focused on digital techniques, which, 21 years ago, were not that sophisticated as they are today. But in those days they were looking very special because they were on their beginning and the most important think was to persuade the teachers that they can do more if they use these techniques.
I remember the first time I talked to my students about GIS they told me that it was very interesting but they wouldn’t be able to use it because the schools couldn’t afford it and also they didn’t have “the know how”. They were very reluctant. That was in 1994.

Since then, too many things have been done in the technical part but I still think that we haven’t done many things in the pedagogical part. Do we really know what to teach and how to teach GIS? Also, what I see is that whenever someone talks about GIS education he/she has not in mind the primary education. This is wrong.

If we want to change things, in favor of GIS, we have to start from primary school. But, are we ready to do so? Do we know what primary school teachers need? What do they think about GIS? Have we talk to them about GIS? In some cases yes. At least in Greece we have done a lot of things about using GIS in primary school the last three years and the teachers have started using it in the classroom (web GIS). The most important thing is that the pupils are amazed when they see what they can do with a GIS. I have done some small projects with primary schools (teachers and pupils of year 4,5 and 6) and they were all successful. There are some examples in the web site of the Hellenic digital earth Centre of Excellence (they are all in Greek because they were done by Greek teachers and pupils).

What I have in mind and would like to propose is that we could start thinking about a project which can involve teachers from every continent who will be asked what they would like to see on a light GIS software in order to use it frequently in their classes. I know that there were some efforts on this in the past years but those days there were no free software available. I am not talking about a “childish GIS”. I am talking about a normal GIS which will not have all these capabilities which are of no use to the teachers. Do we know which of these capabilities they would like to have on a primary school GIS software? (please consider that there are millions of primary schools around the world). We have the privilege to “own” QGIS and we can modify it the way the teachers and pupils will tell us. Let’s ask them. Let’s build a “GIS pedagogy” for primary school. If primary school adopt GIS then it will be easier for middle and high school to follow. Let’s get organized.

I would like to have your opinion on that and the opinion of other members in our network.

Yours
Nikos Lambrinos

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________________________________________
From: labrinos at eled.auth.gr [labrinos at eled.auth.gr]
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2015 10:14 PM
To: 'Suchith Anand'
Cc: labrinos at eled.auth.gr
Subject: some thoughts

Dear Suchith,

I send you a letter which has some ideas of mine to think about. I preferred to send those thoughts in a letter instead of an email because I think it is quite long for an email.

If you think that these thoughts might interest some other members of the network please don’t hesitate to circulate the letter. On the other hand, if you don’t agree then, just let me know.

Best regards

Nikos

<<...>>

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Dr. Nikos Lambrinos

Associate Professor

Dept. of Primary Education

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki

Greece, GR-54124

Tel. +30 2310 991201

Email: labrinos at eled.auth.gr

Web pages: http://labrinos.webpages.auth.gr/digital_geography/

                    http://www.digital-earth.edu.gr/

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