GIS Activities for the Schools
This chapter serves as an overview of the various efforts to introduce GIS concepts and technology into the pre-collegiate learning environment. It represents the findings over the past two and one half years of this thesis research in conjunction with the Secondary Education Project. This search for other existing efforts was seen a fundamental to the correct identification of pertinent research questions both for this research and for future research. These other experiences were also sought in order support or clarify the findings of the pilot study and its workshop.
When considering the various types of activities that provide GIS exposure and learning opportunities for school teachers and students, it is helpful to categorize them. In this overview the scheme used classifies activities for GIS in the schools as organization outreach, independent inquiry, or industry initiatives.
Organization outreach includes attempts by universities, non-profit organizations, and government agencies to expose secondary school teachers and students to GIS. Individual inquiry represents the efforts of individual teachers, concerned community members, and others in the education community (curriculum specialists, principals, and educational administrators). The third category, industry initiatives are the efforts by the GIS software developers and other related industries to familiarize teachers and students with GIS and, often, with their own products.
Independent inquiry is a case of a bottom-up approach; those without the knowledge or resources reaching up to higher education, government, and industry for help. The organization outreach represents the opposite mode; those with the GIS knowledge and resources attempting to share their experience and materials. The industry initiatives may have some profit motivation, though at this stage most of the efforts appear primarily altruistic with good public relations as the only clearly discernible business goal. As is the case with most classification schemes, some of the existing GIS activities for the schools do not neatly fit in one of these categories.
Early GIS Activities for the Schools
In early 1991, the NCGIA had completed and successfully introduced the Core Curriculum in GIS to the collegiate community. There were also other supportive materials for university-level GIS instruction being developed. As the NCGIA pondered the next steps for carrying out the educational mandate outlined in the original proposal to the National Science Foundation -- to augment the nation's supply of individuals with GIS expertise -- there was discussion of the role for GIS in pre-collegiate education. It was surmised that an early exposure to GIS would encourage college students to pursue GIS related study and eventually GIS oriented careers.
The discussion of the possibility of an NCGIA educational initiative targeting secondary schools was not based merely on in-house speculation, but also on inquiries from various sectors including the GIS educational community, the GIS industry, the funding agency (the NSF encourages its national research centers to do outreach to the schools), and the university educators in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Austria who had begun to introduce GIS to their schools. The combination of this researchers proposed thesis work on GIS for the schools and NCGIA interest in the topic led to the birth of the Secondary Education Project. One of the early aims of the SEP was to identify any existing GIS activities for the schools. This was carried out in order to provide a context for SEP activity planning and to support this thesis research.
The early investigation indicated that there was significant interest in the topic, but little related research and activity actually occurring. This instigated the pilot study which continued this early search for existing GIS activities. While the hunt was intensifying, the NCGIA also hosted its first outreach activity, a GIS workshop for secondary school teachers (See chapter 1). The positive results of the workshop encouraged the SEP to continue its efforts to find and connect existing GIS activities for the schools and to support and develop new activities.
The first activities identified in the search included outreach by university professors in countries where the strong tradition of geography instruction in the schools provided a natural inroad for GIS discussion and use. In the United Kingdom, Dr. David Green at Aberdeen University helped organize discussion of GIS in the schools at the 1991 Association for Geographic Information annual meeting. As editor of the Education and Training section of the 1992 Yearbook of the Association, he included two articles on GIS in the schools (see: Wood and Cassettari, 1992; Palladino, 1992). Dr. Green and those involved in these efforts were working with local teachers to implement the requirements in the National Curriculum for Geography which includes the use of technology and even GIS in instruction.
In Austria, Dr. Joseph Strobl of the University of Salzburg was using GIS as the main topic of Saturday in-services for teachers. Dr. Doug Banting of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Canada had organized short workshops for teachers from various Ontario school boards which included GIS as a main topic. Back in the United States, Dr. Wei-Ning Xiang of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte was working with the state education department to provide GIS activities for the state's magnet schools for science, but met with little success perhaps in part due to the lack of a strong geography program to serve as the host discipline.
These professors all had similar outreach goals, namely to expose teachers or teachers and students to GIS, but the particulars of their activities varied depending on needs and structure of the educational establishment in their outreach areas.
Another early example of organizational outreach was the joint effort by the Oregon Department of Education and Portland State University to begin to introduce GIS and Global Positioning Systems (GPS) first into the community colleges and later into the upper level secondary schools as part of the state Workforce 2000 initiative. Workforce 2000 was designed to give students a head start with technology. In the case of GIS and GPS, the initial exposure of high school students to the technology and introductory concepts led to further applied use at the local community college giving the student a strong foundation for employment in forestry and natural resource management.
Early examples of individual inquiry that were identified include the University School in Ohio and the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia. Reinhold Freibertshauser, a teacher at the private, secondary level, University School, and his colleagues sought to have their students apply resource assessment and management skills to the school's 200 acre wooded property with the help of GIS. Reinhold and his colleagues were successful in receiving donations of the SPANS software from Tydac and PC ARC/INFO and ARCVIEW from ESRI. Their students collected environmental data and completed an elevation survey of the property. The students entered these data sets into their GIS database for the campus and intend to use it to manage and analyze the resources found on the campus.
A few states over, in Virginia, a public magnet school for science and technology, Thomas Jefferson High School, began to include GIS and Remote Sensing as components of its high powered geoscience program. Mr. Bill Johnson and his colleagues used PC ARC/INFO and IDRISI to introduce GIS concepts to their students. They attempted to cover many of the topics common in an introductory GIS course in a university, though at a level more appropriate to precocious high school students. The topics covered included raster and vector data representations, the concept of layers of thematic data and map feature classes, simple GIS operations such as buffer and reclassify, and simple filters for raster data. The extent of the coverage was limited to the topics which the instructors could teach themselves with the materials they had available (which included the Core Curriculum.) At one point the department was arranging with the state to work with some of the rural school districts in a joint land/human resource assessment project utilizing GIS.
Both of these early examples of teachers using GIS in the classroom are not likely to represent the dominant model for future GIS activities in the schools. These schools were extremely well endowed with computer equipment, advanced students, and flexible curricula.
Early industry initiatives were mainly found to be "potential initiatives". A handful of companies or individuals with ties to the industry contacted the NCGIA to indicate their interest in GIS for the schools, but did not report on existing activities. One exception to the "potential initiative" mode was ComGrafix, Inc. which lent a copy of its GIS software, MapGrafix, and appropriate hardware to a school in Virginia to use as part of a state science competition in 1991. Students were asked to address the problem, "How can telecommunications and information technologies be used to improve the environmental quality of life in the greater Washington area in fields such as: waste management, water management, indoor air quality, pest and pesticide generated problems, or aircraft induced pollution." The Marshall High School team came up with an Environmental Data Evaluation Network (EDEN) as a conceptual framework for dealing with this problem. EDEN would rely heavily on GIS technology. The students used MapGrafix to demonstrate the role of GIS in EDEN to the judges of the competition. (Roberts and Lynn, 1991)
Since the SEP began to identify these initial activities, many more have been identified. Together these various activities form a rather mottled patchwork. There is not much in the way of coordination, consistency, or common materials between these various activities; however, the SEP has been actively attempting to network the various players so that the experiences from the wide variety of activities could benefit one another and aid future attempts to bring GIS to the world of pre-collegiate education.
Recently there has been a marked increase in interest in GIS for the schools. This is built in part on increased emphasis in the schools on subjects such as geography, science, technology, and environmental studies, on learning strategies such as group work and critical thinking, and on interdisciplinary activities. Each of these trends can be addressed by GIS-based activities. This interest in GIS seems to be following a similar increase in activities designed to involved students and teachers in the use of remotely sensed imagery. The coherent driving forces for geography in the schools, the Geographic Alliance Network and the National Council for Geographic Education, have both committed themselves to exposing teachers and students to remote sensing and GIS both as a example of the emphases listed above and as a means of ensuring that the geography re-emerging in the schools is contemporary.
Another influential player in this movement to make GIS available to the schools is the GIS vendor ESRI. They have a full-time K-12 education position in their ARCVIEW working group. This individual, Mr. Charlie Fitzpatrick, has been instrumental in providing ARCVIEW to schools at low or no cost through their Adopt-a-School program. He is also creating curriculum materials to accompany this geographic information display software. Although ARCVIEW has limited analysis capabilities compared to ESRI's ARC/INFO, the ability of ARCVIEW to use ARC/INFO data sets allows the teacher using ARCVIEW not only to use the wealth of world and US data on CD provided with ARCVIEW, but also provides a possibility of viewing the data of any local agency that happens to use ARC/INFO. Since many municipalities, resource management agencies, and research labs use ARC/INFO, there are many data sets that are potentially available to these teachers.
In addition to these large scope activities, there are many smaller efforts to implement GIS software and concepts in the schools. A description of some of the key activities that have been identified follows in order to provide a perspective on the range of existing activities and a sense of the environment in which this research has developed.
Organization Outreach
Various organizations have employed different strategies for GIS awareness in the schools. In some cases teachers are the target audience for a GIS demonstration or workshop at the organization's site. In other cases, students are the ones who come into the lab. Some organizations have sent representatives out to the schools. Other forms of outreach include cooperative GIS programs and GIS materials development efforts.
The following examples have emphasized outreach to K-12 teachers:
The NCGIA has held three workshops for teachers including the prototype workshop discussed in detail in Chapter 1. The NCGIA Santa Barbara hosted its second one-week "GIS in the Schools" workshop in June, 1993. Nine teachers were selected by the Coordinators of six state Geographic Alliances to attend this workshop. Unlike the first workshop in which the NCGIA Santa Barbara hosted a group of local science and social studies teachers who had varying levels of computer experience, this group was specifically interested in teaching geography and had significant experience with computers. The workshop was intended to send these individuals back to their respective Alliances to serve as the GIS resource person.
The workshop was similar to the first workshop in that it included a short course in GIS, demonstrations of various GIS applications, hands-on work with different GIS software packages, and discussion sessions. This workshop, however, also included a group project. The teachers were given a set of data on the local area and used the IDRISI GIS package to help identify a site for a new elementary school. Data included elevation, hill slope values, land use, existing school locations, and various transportation networks. Each group of teachers added some additional data and integrated the data sets to produce a composite map showing the available sites for construction. This project helped to demonstrate some of the analytical capabilities of GIS software and provided an example of a potential GIS exercise for students.
The NCGIA Maine also hosted a one-week workshop in the summer of 1993. Seven Maine earth science and computer applications teachers spent the week learning about GIS and working with GIS software. These teachers participated in the same types of activities as the teachers in Santa Barbara. Instead of the IDRISI group project, however, each of the teachers used ESRI's ARCVIEW software to create their own project that they could use in the classroom with the copies of ARCVIEW that each participant received.
In addition to the NCGIA workshops, other academics and organizations have held workshops, weekend in-services, and open houses for teachers. Dr. Doug Banting of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, Ontario has given a series of seminars for teachers during their "professional development" days. His presentations have been included the following topics: Overview of GIS Concepts, Geographic Skills - Careers in GIS, and Cultivating a Geographic Perspective. Also in Canada, the Ontario Association for Geographic and Environmental Education, a professional organization that includes pre-collegiate geography teachers, had GIS as a prominent topic in its 1993 annual meeting.
Dr. Don Lundquist, Chris Keithley, and Brain Tolk at the University of Nebraska coordinated a four day workshop on Remote Sensing and GIS in the summer of 1993 using funding from NASA. Many of the topics were related more closely to remote sensing, but there was time spent on spatial analysis and general GIS topics. Some use of the ARCVIEW and IDRISI software packages was also included.
The National Geographic Society Geographic Alliance effort includes a four-week advanced summer leadership institute in Washington, DC. In the summer of 1993, Dr. Bill Strong, the coordinator for this ILI institute, included sessions on maps, remote sensing, and GIS. In addition, many of the state Geographic Alliances are beginning to include discussion and demonstrations of GIS as part of their summer institutes.
The following examples have emphasized outreach to K-12 students:
The Workforce 2000 project mentioned above brings actual GIS training right into the classroom as part of a vocational training program that continues at the local community college. Here the emphasis is on using GIS to perform specific tasks rather than merely providing an overview of GIS as a tool used in modern society. It also does not focus on GIS as an educational tool per se. The initial efforts of this project were at the community college with a follow-up extension to the local schools as the community college effort became established. The initial software packages that were utilized included GeoSQL, AutoCAD, and ARC/INFO. Two directions for students using GIS in the high schools and community colleges were envisioned: forestry applications and surveying/mapping applications.
Dr. Bill Huxhold, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Urban and Regional Planning professor, has not only done outreach to teachers in his GIS lab, but has also brought a group of students in as part of the "Teen University" program. This two-week course had students work through urban planning problems using GIS, especially ESRI's ARCVIEW (Audet, et al., 1993).
Like Huxhold, Dr. Derek Thompson has organized activities for both teachers and students. In November, 1992 during Geography Awareness Week, he coordinated a GIS awareness day at the University of Maryland, College Park and several other sites in the local area. This regional event included universities, schools, libraries, community groups, government agencies, professional organizations, and businesses. Many of these entities with GIS opened their doors to librarians, teachers, students, and the general public. The University of Maryland, College Park hosted three groups of high school students.
In Spain, David Comas at the University of Girona reports that since 1990, 500 high schools students have attended short workshops in their GIS lab. This exposure of students and their teachers to GIS has resulted in a project sponsored by the university and the regional government of Catalonia geared to GIS in the schools. This "Educational Cartomatics" project has resulted in three schools offering a summer school course in GIS in the summer, 1992. The same geographers and teachers that led those courses are developing a 10 unit set of GIS course materials based on data from the Natural Park of Gavarres.
In Canada, Dr. Bob Maher at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources is organizing a program that may include a set of GIS/Environmental Education camps for students.
In addition to these more formal outreaches to students many geographers and other professionals have demonstrated GIS for students touring their facilities or have included discussion of GIS during guest speaking engagements in the schools.
The following examples have emphasized outreach through comprehensive projects:
These activities go beyond merely holding an isolated workshop or giving demonstrations of GIS in school classrooms. For example, Dr. Roland Tinline at Queens University in Ontario, Canada has worked with the Ontario Ministry of Education, local school boards, and software companies to develop a program that will introduce GIS into the classroom. Initially groups of students and teachers have been brought into the GIS lab at Queens. In the lab, the teachers are first trained, then they used the lab to teach their students. A progression of software was used starting with CAD software, then Atlas*Graphics, and IDRISI. This project is still evolving.
The New England Science Center in Massachusetts is incorporating GIS into their presentations for both the schools and the general public. They are developing a curriculum on Global Change Research with funding from NOAA. This and other curricula developed will expose teachers and students to the IDRISI GIS package.
At Cornell University, CLEARS (Cornell Lab for Environmental Applications of Remote Sensing) personnel have developed a program, Explorations from an Aerial Perspective, which although primarily focussed on aerial photography also includes some work with satellite imagery and GIS. This program trains teams of educators including classroom teachers and nature center and museum staff to use aerial photos and maps in teaching. Advanced training includes GIS.
Government agencies which use GIS often provide the most tangible example of GIS use to their local communities. Some of these agencies have communicated their GIS applications to their local schools. The South Florida Water Management District has begun an outreach project for the schools in the state. The project is based on ESRI's Adopt-a-School Program for ARCVIEW. Since the SFWMD does much of its work in ARC/INFO, it has local data that may be of special interest to the local schools that have ARCVIEW.
The last form of outreach listed here is instructional materials development:
Statistics Canada, a government agency, has developed a software package which allows schools to interact with some of the data the agency has collected. Although not a GIS package, it does allow for thematic mapping and provides data that can be used by students in a GIS.
The National Council for Geographic Education has begun to develop a series of lesson plans utilizing ARCVIEW. Under funding from the NSF, Dr. Merrill Ridd at the University of Utah is developing ARCVIEW-based learning modules on environmental themes such as catastrophic flooding, desertification, and urban growth as detected in remotely sensed images. The NCGIA SEP is a third party developing ARCVIEW materials. The SEP is also putting together ARCVIEW modules that will develop human geography themes around GIS data sets showcasing the power of GIS as an educational tool.
The SEP has also produced a Workshop Resource Packet and a African Data Viewer. The resource packet was developed in part as a report on the NCGIA prototype GIS workshop for secondary school teachers. This report has been bundled with some additional resources that evolved from the workshop. The packet is designed primarily to aid institutions with GIS expertise and technology in their efforts to create outreach activities for their local schools. Much of the material in the packet, however, would also be of use to secondary school teachers and others who are looking for some basic GIS instructional aids. The packet includes a thorough outline of the workshop components, an evaluation of the success of those components, and a suggested format for future workshops. In addition, there is a section reviewing the status of GIS in the secondary schools, a set of teacher project summaries (mainly manual activities that could be adapted to GIS software), GIS short course outline notes, a GIS for the schools resource list (software and curriculum materials), and a plain language GIS glossary.
The African Data Viewer is a series of digital data sets of Africa on a 3.5" diskette. The 30 data sets range from population density to average rainfall. Many of the sets show soil characteristics (e.g., soils affected by overgrazing) that were compiled as part of a United Nations Environmental Program study of desertification. The data sets come with the display modules of the IDRISI GIS software. This subset of the IDRISI package allows the data to be displayed on an IBM or compatible computer, but will not perform advanced GIS analysis and data manipulation.
Independent Inquiry
In many cases interest in GIS for the Schools has begun with individuals -- researchers, teachers, or just concerned community members. The first group of independent inquirers discussed are the researchers. A small number of graduate students and university faculty have made the topic of GIS in the schools a focus of some of their research.
Dr. Kay Weller recently completed a geography education Ph.D. which utilized a set of IDRISI-based exercises on water resource management that she developed. She taught the same 10 lessons to groups of 6th graders. One group used no GIS/spatial analysis techniques, another used manual GIS techniques, a third used an automated GIS [IDRISI], and a final group used both automated and manual techniques. The behavioral objective of this exercise was for students to be able to make a hypothesis relating water resources and precipitation to climate and vegetation. Dr. Weller found that students could make the association, but the performance level of the different groups was clouded by problems with the configuration of the computer lab and inappropriate student groupings.
As his dissertation in the Education Department at Boston University, Dr. Richard Audet, analyzed the cognitive strategies employed by participants in the ARCVIEW activities of Dr. Bill Huxhold's GIS outreach effort (see above). The cognitive strategies he identified for spatial problem solving with ARCVIEW included scrolling through the tables and windows -- a trial and error approach, spatial querying -- using tools, color codes, and labels, and logical querying -- use of the built-in query function of the software. Two of his main assertions were "predilections for certain types of ARCVIEW problem solving behaviors can be distinguished between experts and novices" and "people interact with problem solving technologies in ways that are highly idiosyncratic." (Audet, 1993, pp.88,92) Audet concludes that much is still to be learned regarding the cognitive benefits of GIS-based education and articulates a concern that those without an education background will design technology oriented materials not appropriate for the classroom. While Audet's research represents a useful starting point for the investigation of the cognitive aspects of learning with GIS, it is limited in its universal application due to its monocular focus on ARCVIEW as the exemplar of GIS software. The findings are also clouded by evidence that the researcher had a very limited understanding of GIS as is exemplified by the following statement: "The only limiting factors in GIS are the scope of the database and the technical and problem solving proficiencies of the operator." (Audet, 1993, p.4) [emphasis added]
In Australia, Dr. Colin Davey of the Faculty of Education at the University of Sydney has received some funding to do some small-scale research on the use of GIS in the secondary schools. It has involved using IDRISI and OSU-Map on a local data base but may be extended to include MapInfo for work on the 1991 Australian Population Census data.
In addition to these efforts, as many as a half dozen other research efforts on GIS in the Schools are being carried out, mainly as part of Masters theses or Ph.D. dissertations.
Although it is most common for GIS activities for schools to originate in university GIS labs and geography and education departments, many teachers that have been exposed to GIS in one form or another have expressed interest in and in some cases begun GIS activities in their classrooms. The efforts of Freibertshauser and his colleagues at the University School and of Johnson and his fellow teachers at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology have been noted above. Below are some additional examples of this type of individual teacher motivation to incorporate GIS in their teaching.
In the United Kingdom, with the clear presentation in the national curriculum of a role for GIS in geography education, Mr. Rob Wheatley, a teacher at Langdon Park School in London's Docklands, has developed a Geography and Information Technology course. This course includes a three-week segment on GIS which complements two other segments on weather monitoring and remote sensing. Most of the work is manual, but they are using a CD of 1981 UK census data, PC Globe, and a simple thematic mapping package, Mappit.
At Seaside High School in Oregon, Mike Brown is utilizing ARC/INFO and ARCVIEW as tools for students in his Coastal Studies program. The students use GIS to monitor and map environmental characteristics of the Columbia River. On the other side of the continent in Toronto, Ontario, John Niccolucci is using IDRISI with his students at Bante Academy. He has adapted IDRISI exercises designed for the university to his secondary school teaching.
The teachers listed above have begun to use GIS in earnest in their teaching. Another group of teachers are just beginning to implement GIS in their classrooms. Harold Matz of the predominantly minority Roberto Clemente High School in Chicago is planning a GIS course for his students and would like to emphasize business uses of GIS. Samuel Tumolo, a math teacher at the Cincinnati Country Day School, is designing a combined Earth Science/Algebra I course that will use GIS as one of its tools. Like the University School, he plans to have students gather environmental data from the area surrounding the campus and put it into the GIS.
Many teachers are beginning to find ways to incorporate the ARCVIEW software they have received from ESRI at no or low cost into their teaching. Randall Raymond at Cass Technical High School in Detroit is planning to use ARCVIEW to study a watershed in the Detroit area. In some cases, as is true for Eric Pauly at Ben Franklin Junior High School in Fargo, South Dakota, grant proposals are being written for the hardware to run the ARCVIEW software. This is also the situation for Martin Schmidt at the private McDonogh School in Baltimore. He has frequently attended a GIS conference held at Towson State University. He wants to utilize both ARCVIEW and IDRISI in his teaching, but must first acquire the hardware.
The final category of individual inquirer are those in the workplace and community at large that have been exposed to GIS and have recognized its potential in the classroom. In some instances these individuals offer their experience to a local school. In other cases these individuals precipitate a larger organizational effort as in the case of Joe Chapa of the South Florida Water Management District.
As noted above, Mike Brown of Seaside High has his students using GIS to study the Columbia River. Much of the data has been provided by John Graves who works as coastal planner with an agency monitoring and managing the lower 60 miles of the Columbia. John has provided the ARC/INFO data sets for Mike's students to use. This pattern of teacher with ARCVIEW and helpful contact in industry, government, or university providing ARC/INFO data sets and know-how was intentionally incorporated in the ESRI Adopt-a-School program.
In the upper peninsula of Michigan, Karen Poulsen, the Director of General Education for a school district, is coordinating a project that will have students use GIS with data provided by the local health department to assess local groundwater contamination.
John Schmidt, an Educational Affairs Specialist for NOAA, is looking for a GIS software package that can allow students to easily access and analyze Global Change Database information. He envisions this global change data and GIS package in an 8th or 9th grade earth science course.
Other interested individuals range from David Tunnell, a former high school teacher now at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, who sees his present work with GIS as having application to the schools in his area, to Andrew Price, a professional geographer with a land development company, who would like to develop a GIS lab in a local school designed for high risk kids.
As GIS becomes increasingly visible in our society, more and more individuals in the schools and the community will recognize its inherent educational potential in the schools. This growth of individual inquiry will lead to many more GIS activities in the schools.
Industry Initiatives
The GIS industry has been slow to promote their software in the schools, perhaps in part due to the earlier mismatch of GIS complexity with educational requirements. As software becomes more user friendly and as schools acquire hardware powerful enough to run the newer PC-based GIS packages, GIS software appears to be positioned for a greater involvement in the schools. The primary example of this is ESRI with its wide distribution of ARCVIEW to the schools (described above). ComGrafix and some other companies have made copies of their software available to a few schools, but have not made as clear a commitment to actively support GIS in the Schools as ESRI has.
One example of a GIS package that is being used in some schools and will probably be used in more in the future is IDRISI. The IDRISI Project has made some copies of the software available to some of the schools mentioned in the Individual Inquiry section of this chapter. Some teachers are buying IDRISI as a simple, educationally oriented GIS. The IDRISI Project has helped the NCGIA develop the African Data Viewer. There is, however, some reticence on the part of The IDRISI Project to promote the use of IDRISI in the schools, since it was not specifically designed for that environment and it may create an unworkable software support demand.
Other software packages that have been used in the classroom include Map II for the Macintosh, OSU Map, and GADS. In each of these cases, the companies/organizations producing the software are interested in seeing their software used in the schools, but have not yet decided to actively promote and support its use in the schools.
In the United Kingdom, a GIS software package has been designed specifically for the schools. This was done in part to satisfy the mandate to use GIS laid out in the National Curriculum. This AEGIS package was created by The Advisory Unit: Computers in Education. The director of the Advisory Unit, Diana Freeman, is continuing to develop the AEGIS software and database and also curriculum materials. The present functionality of the software is shy of a what many would classify as a "true" GIS package. It has limited ability to import, integrate, and export data sets. It does allow students to collect their own data and input them into the database. A set of four example data sets are included along with lesson plans tied to the National Curriculum for each. Despite or perhaps because of its simplicity, this package may be well received in the schools especially in the U.K..
In addition to direct action by the GIS software companies, some "value added" vendors have expressed interest in creating interfaces that would make a GIS package more accessible to students and have discussed developing curriculum materials for the software. Carol Houst and Genene Miller of the Ecological Entrepreneurs Network are investigating the potentials for a value added version of GRASS that would be designed for use in the secondary schools. They have a goal of "bridging the gap in geographic software between games on one end and esoteric, expensive high end GIS systems on the other." (Miller, 1992) At Amperif, another GIS "value adding" company, Hal Watson is investigating creating an educational package based around MapInfo.
A final group in the GIS industry that can have an impact on GIS in the schools are the GIS consulting firms and trade magazine companies. GIS World, Inc., publishers of GIS World and Business Geographics magazines, invited teachers and students to its 1993 GIS in Business Conference in Boston. Greenhorne & O'Mara, an engineering consulting firm, has created a program with Glenarden Elementary School in Maryland to help acquaint students, teachers, and counselors with the uses of GIS and the professional opportunities it presents. Also in Maryland, Century Technologies has teamed up with IBM and the Prince George County schools in a strategic alliance for the development of a pilot Geographic Information Systems Cooperative Education Program (GISCEP). The aim of this program is to provide disadvantaged youth with high technology exposure and to prepare high school seniors for moderate skill level positions in GIS systems support.
To date it appears that most of these industry initiatives are not profit motivated, since at best they provide a small amount of publicity and few purchases of software. In fact the unifying factor underlying these activities seems to be a motivation by individuals in these companies to do something for their local schools. One generalization that may be suggested is that GIS software companies that are headed by researchers rather than businessmen seem more motivated to work with schools, teachers, and students. The continued and expanded support of the GIS business community will be a great boon for the effort to bring the power of GIS to the schools.
Conclusion
As can be determined from this set of examples of GIS activities for schools, there are many points of light, but little consistency. This is mainly a reflection of the relative newness of GIS in the broader research and business communities. It is just over a decade since the personal computer began to make major inroads into society and only recently have schools been able to procure inexpensive computers capable of running GIS software. This many also explain the fact that most of the efforts identified are not very extensive nor are they easily transferable to schools in other parts of the country or world. Some exceptions exist, mainly in countries other than the U.S., where the GIS activities for the schools are well established. Examples of these include Roly Tinline's project in Ontario, Canada and the AEGIS software and GIS content in the National Curriculum of the U.K..
Whether the activities identified were well established or fledgling, they showed a consistency with the teacher/consultant suggestions in terms of impediments that GIS use in the schools would face. Many of these projects rely on the enthusiasm of a particular teacher who may even utilize their own personal computer in order to accomplish GIS in the classroom. Venturing beyond these individuals can often be difficult when situations such as teacher resistance to change or unfamiliarity with computers, miniscule computing budgets, and rigid curricula are run up against.
As the SEP and this research have progressed, there has been a distinct quickening in the quantity, scope, duration, and nature of GIS projects for the schools. Unfortunately despite this increased activity, these projects still remain fairly uncoordinated with few reported research findings which could serve to guide and link the many projects. Despite this flurry of activity, most of the impediments mentioned by the teachers still remain. It is also interesting to note that a majority of the projects identified by the SEP search showed teaching about GIS (or at least demonstrating the potential) was much more common that using GIS a teaching tool for a variety of curricular topics with spatial components. This points out a mis-match between the teacher/consultant identified need and the thrust of the existing activities for the schools. This may prove to be a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of GIS methods and software in the schools.
The next chapter concludes the research findings of this thesis. It explores the future for GIS in the schools focussing in part on some of the key impediments remaining. These include, in addition to the mismatch between the perspectives of the "GIS providers" and the "GIS adopters" identified above, a lack of appropriate software, insufficient computer hardware in the schools, limited data availability, next to no ready-to-go curriculum materials, and general unfamiliarity with GIS among educators. Many of these hurdles are presently being overcome and with some insight and general planning, GIS may play a significant role in secondary school education by the turn of the century.