Geospatial technologies for teaching history & economics
NASD Social Studies in-service: Wednesday, Aug 22, morning session
What are geospatial technologies?
Something from yesterday: The flickr map.
Something you've probably used for personal purposes: Google Maps.
Something pretty far out: Jefferson's Travels to England.
And something that is NOT (in my humble opinion) a geospatial technology: animated maps of holocaust history (from USHMM).
We're focusing on just two geospatial technologies: Google Earth (earth.google.com) and My World GIS (free trial download). Google Earth is free; My World requires a license; you will be getting one.
Google Earth
Who already uses this? How?
Getting to know the tool
Search box
Layers
How to navigate
Adding markup
Let's see examples of what it can do
So how/why might I want to use Google Earth in my class?
Placing events in a geographic context (e.g., Battle of Little Bighorn)
Tracking events across time / geo-space (e.g., expansion of Third Reich)
Providing a basemap for lectures / worksheets / etc.
Having students construct or edit/extend markup
Try it yourself: Create a folder with a few (2-3) markup items, save it to a file, then send that file to a colleague. Did it work?
Problem areas
Navigation
Editing markup
Organizing and saving your work
Where to go for more
Help with using Google Earth: http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/google_earth/UserGuide.html, created by Glenn A. Richard of Stony Brook. Lots of additional info on the same site.
More files created by others:
Browse my (idiosyncratic) list http://delicious.com/tchammond/GE
Search for things on your own: Go to Google, type in the search terms (e.g., "Holy Roman Empire"), then add "filetype:kmz" or "filetype:kml" to return ONLY files that will load in Google Earth.
My World GIS
The easiest way to understand what a GIS does is to see some examples
Example #1: The Holocaust
You start with data. For example, I found these numbers: http://www1.yadvashem.org/IMAGE_TYPE/8381.jpg & 8380.jpg
I then added them into an existing GIS map to create this: Jewish populations circa Holocaust ver01a.m3vz
We have a browsable map, like Google Earth, but...
...we can color-code the map using the data
...and we can conduct analyses on the spot
Questions / concerns?
Example #2: Civil War battles
This time I found a Google Earth layer: http://www.cwoodcock.com/Civil_War_by_Campaign.kmz
I wanted to be able to sort and analyze the data, so I converted it to a GIS file (temporarily in ArcGIS, not My World, but it can easily be moved)
How/why is this an important piece of software?
Combination of maps & data – two of the weaker areas for social studies students
Opportunities for new styles of pedagogy. For example, consider the predict-observe-explain model from science class, applied to antebellum slave populations. (Again, dataset is in ArcGIS, but can be run in My World)
Balancing of micro and macro understandings of history? (e.g., Holocaust data = macro, but raises interesting connections to the micro)
Opportunities to be surprised
Surprise yourself: Who knew to expect Holocaust data from Libya & Tunisia? What's the story with Bulgaria?
Surprise your students: In the slave data, most students won't know to expect enslaved persons living in Pennsylvania all the way up to the 1840s!
Be surprised by your students: Detailed, map-driven note-taking (but your mileage may vary...)
Important caveats
Software is challenging to learn
Data can be hard to find
Maps can be even harder to find
You don't have the software yet!
Things working in your favor
The software is coming! In the meantime, feel free to play around with the free trial
I will happily do the hard stuff for you!
Many tools are moving online. For example, I moved the Eastern Theater battles from the Civil War data into a browser-based GIS.
Following up: I actually have an ongoing list of Google Earth & GIS materials posted here: Geospatial Social Studies
Questions / comments / concerns?
Goals, timing for afternoon session