[Ica-osgeo-labs] Geo4All School Network

[Suchith Anand]

Dear colleagues,

Geo4All is committed to work for open principles in geoeducation and protect open principles for our future generations. Empowerment of teachers is important to enable empowerment of students. Thanks to Dr. Nikos Lambrinos (Greece) and Elżbieta Wołoszyńska-Wiśniewska (Poland) who are our chairs for Teacher Training & School Education thematic who have been providing us some excellent inputs and ideas for helping us empower school teachers globally. One of the main points raised was that currently our focus is on higher education/universities and all our labs are in university level and school education(primary and secondary) has very different requirements and needs and hence it is important to create a seperate network theme for schools . This network's focus should be directly related to school education and involving partners from this sector. We are grateful to Ela and Nikos for thier leadership and inputs for us.

Now we have reached critical mass in university level , we need to focus on expanding this to school level and to do that we need to have seperate school network started as Nikos righly pointed out as the requirements/needs are very different. In fact, i believe that if we start a school level focussed network now (building upon the networks and infrastructure we have in place), it will become much much bigger than the university network and have wider impact.

We now also have access to different online platforms like GeoAcademy ( good for our teacher training needs but not currently for school level students) . Phil has kindly send us this info that GeoAcademy can provide a starting point for a 5 course sequence in Introduction to Geospatial Technology using QGIS to be adopted and/or adapted by any college, school, etc. The free curriculum can be downloaded here: http://spatialquerylab.com/projects/open-source-gis/ . The course can be enrolled in directly, for free, at anytime by anyone from anywhere here: http://fossgeo.org/free-qgis-courses/. Finally, an example of a Canadian Technical College adapting these can be found here http://www.gogeomatics.ca/magazine/open-source-gis-for-everyone-a-qgis-based-program-at-langara-college-vancouver.htm

For wider spatial literacy in school level , we will need an online platform that is free and open as well as easy to use. Hence it is important to explore collaborations with other like minded organisations, so last week we (Maria, Nikos and myself - few more were planning to join but couldn't make it) had a telemeeting with Chris Tucker of Mapstory Foundation to help us understand more about thier software and platform. Chris kindly explain details of the platform and its user friendliness (you don't need to be a GIS expert to use it which is a good advantage). We also discussed some good examples (for example mapping the neighbourhood) to help teach spatial literacy in schools globally. I think having MapStory examples of deforestation in different places might also be a good example to help teach students on effects of climate change as well as need for protecting the environment. Teaching Spatial literacy in schools  is key for also helping build good global citizens.

For Geo4All, we welcome collaboration with everyone who follows our principles. Our main requirement for the online education platform  is that all the software and tools used for our education will need to be free and open (not only now but for the future). The reason is that we have seen some examples in geo domain where tools that started as 'free' later changed conditions. For example, Google Earth even if not open source, they offered an open API attacting lot of users, which they also took away after a while. Now the open source ‘version’ of Cesium is again looks like planning to charge users for their 'premium' version , so we need to be careful and understand full details of any educational platform and tools that we think of using. So i am kindly request Chris and MapStory Foundation to provide confirmation that all the underlying software and tools (including the Virtual Globes) are all free and open source software so that we can be assured that the MapStory platform will be fully free and open for everyone in the long term.

I also request colleagues to go through http://mapstory.org/  platform and any queries/more information that you have, please ask Chris and he will be pleased to answer. I really hope we all can work together and scale up ideas for expanding our school education programs globally.

Best wishes,

Suchith





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