[Ica-osgeo-labs] QGIS in education

[Hogan, Patrick (ARC-PX)]

Dear OSGEO Folks,

This document by Akademia EduGIS of Poland is a beautiful piece of work!
"GIS at School: Guidebook for biology, geography, and science teachers."
http://www.edugis.pl/en/images/stories/guide/gis-at-school.pdf

GIS-User
It provides the kind of high level thinking that would greatly benefit any GIS course development. 
Along with fully-fledged use cases for teachers to apply in the classroom.
This should be required reading for anyone building a GIS-user course.
I hope we can organize this GIS-user activity into an ^online^ library of GIS-user courses.
Using GIS tools is an important part of today's education,
for understanding the sweep of human history as well as life on this planet.

GIS-Tool-Builder
I am a former high school science teacher myself, 30 years ago, 
and that is where I left my heart in terms of what this planet needs, 
a world class education for all. Now I am in the business of trying 
to improve the quality of ^open source^ GIS technology by providing 
software engineers the virtual globe technology to ^build^ GIS tools.

GIS-Tool-Builder Professors
For those university professors, like Phil Davis and Maria Brovelli, 
who build educational experiences for ^development^ of these tools, 
how about a working group that allows us to share ideas and maximize our mutual efforts?
Anyone who would like to join this group, please feel free to step forward.

-Patrick
 650.604.5656 (office)
 650.269.2788 (cell)

-----Original Message-----
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Suchith Anand
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2015 1:30 AM
To: Adrian Manning; "pdavis at delmar.edu"@domain.invalid; lfi at ign.ku.dk; ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] QGIS in education

Hi Adrian,

Thank you for your email and great to hear about your work. It will be great if we can work with you in your plans to create a suite of GIS lessons using  QGIS to match the themes of the new National Curriculum, GCSE and A-Level content directives which have emerged from the Department for Education.  It will not only benefit students in the UK but globally as the materials we create will be in Creative Commons licences and with the Free and Open Source Software (QGIS) that will be used, it can be used by other school teachers globally also.

Also we can learn from experiences in other countries for this. For example, Ela and colleagues in Poland's work on GIS at Schools http://www.edugis.pl/en/images/stories/guide/gis-at-school.pdf, Sergio and colleagues work on gvSIG Batovi in Uruguay can all give ideas and collaborations.

So could i suggest the following steps, so we can work with you on this.

1. Please join our mail list at http://lists.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ica-osgeo-labs  (it is an open list, so anyone interested are welcome to join) so you can get updated and also inform your other school teachers to join.

2. We are in the process of creating new thematic groups in geoforall and it will be great with your expertise if you can lead the thematic on teacher training at Geo for All. We will create all background support (the mail lists, etc) needed for you.

3. It will be really good if you (or any of your colleagues) are able to attend the QGIS conference in Denmark. That will be a good opportunity to build collaborations with other educators.

I am ccing our colleagues in GeoforAll as they will be pleased to give you inputs. 

We are looking forward to work with you on this.

Best wishes,

Suchith

________________________________________
From: Adrian Manning [j.d.w.m at btinternet.com]
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2015 9:58 PM
To: "pdavis at delmar.edu"@domain.invalid; lfi at ign.ku.dk
Cc: Suchith Anand
Subject: QGIS in education

Dear Both,

I am a member of the GIS-UK jiscmail email group and have had a recent email from Suchith Anand concerning QGIS in education and suggesting members of the email circulation get in touch with you both to register their interest/use of QGIS in educational settings.

I am a secondary school geography and geology teacher here in the UK who has been dabbling with GIS for a few years now in my teaching. I have used a number of programmes - ESRI's old Digital Worlds and AEGIS3 to start back in 2011, and am now working with ESRI ArcGIS Online and QGIS. I am also a volunteer with a number of subject associations in the UK and for whom I am creating GIS lessons, currently I am looking to create a suite of GIS lessons using either QGIS or ArcGIS Online to match the themes of the new National Curriculum, GCSE and A-Level content directives which have emerged from the Department for Education.

To this end it is my firm belief that to ensure/encourage greater uptake of GIS in geography secondary education the GIS used needs to be simple, less complex then desktop GIS and easy for teachers to use 'off the shelf'/'out of the box' without requiring a lot of training or subscriptions. I am therefore favouring using QGIS with which to create the lessons I am working because it is web based and free to use. I am also currently undertaking an MPhil/PhD looking at the extent to which the use of GIS can enhance student's understanding of the geographies of place.

Thanks,

Adrian

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