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
  
  • Expedition of Lewis & Clark.
  • Great Wall(s) of China.
• 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

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