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
- More files created by others: http://delicious.com/tchammond/GE
- 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.
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)
- Example #1: The Holocaust
- 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