Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Our US GIS colleagues












Left image: Emus in a creek, Flinders Ranges, South Australia.
Right image: Rural South Australia, 100 kilometres North of Adelaide.

Related sites to the Spatialworlds project
Spatialworlds website
21st Century Geography Google Group
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
'Towards a National Geography Curriculum' project website
Geography Teachers' Association of South Australia website
Email contact
manning@chariot.net.au

Where am I??
Adelaide, Australia: S: 34º 55' E: 138º 36'


GISetc.com

In this posting I will profile the GIS site of Anita and Roger Palmer, GIS specialists in Dallas and good friends of Australian geography and geographers. Over the years Roger and Anita have been regular attendees at Australian Geography conferences and have been extremely supportive and innovative drivers of GIS in schools through the development of learning resources and workshops. The workshops they conduct when they visit are always “state of the art” and inspiring to those who attend. Back in 2007 I had the good fortune to spend several days with Roger and Anita visiting schools in the Dallas area. It was great to see the practical and real use of GIS in the classrooms we visited.

Roger and Anita also offer GIS Institutes annually with participants coming from the United States, Canada, England, and New Zealand. GISetc has developed a training model that is effective for beginners to advanced users of computer technology in geospatial and general technologies. I
I see that another of our US GIS colleagues, Barbaree Ash Duke is also a contributor to the GISetc.com site. Barbaree does some great work concerning GIS in the classroom and has a great blog called “GIS in Education and Curriculum Integration”. Barbaree’s blog is certainly worth following to go through her substantial archive.

Their website, GISetc.com is full of resources and good ideas to support the use of spatial technology in the classroom. As they say on the site, the mission of GISetc.com is to:

“provide cutting-edge GIS professional development, curriculum and software support to K-12 and post-secondary educators and students. Our goal is to advance education, improve quality of curricula, provide authentic research and learning projects, and to provide teacher training and skill development in an atmosphere of discovery.”

It certainly lives up to this aim by providing links to:

*free resources

* GIS games and fun

* Conference presentations

* GIS Happenings

* Books and resources via the GISetc.com shop

I have just highlighted a few of the free resource links from the site here to give a taste of the sites value to the GIS interested.

* Scary maps

* Exploring super cities

* 7 Million people

* Cartography and Indiana Jones

* Last month the extent of sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean declined to the second-lowest extent on record. Review satellite data from NASA, watch videos and read about the phenomenon.


I look forward to report more on Anita and Roger’s site in the future.

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