High School

The GeoX: Geosciences Exploration Summer Program  is a FREE one-week program for high-achieving high  school juniors and seniors by being offered by Texas A & M (June 1-8, 2012).  It combines a mixture of classroom, campus, and field trips, along with technical and career skills.  The geosciences, especially geography, is a field that takes more recruitment at the high school level because of the misconception that geography is only being able to name all the countries in the world. This is changing as more high school outreach programs like this one introduce students to real life applications of geospatial skills and awareness. Application deadline is: April 9

Junior High

The TwiST GIS Summer Camp is offered by the Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technologies (IAGT), Cayuga Community College, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, the National Geospatial Technology Center, CIESIN and the New York State GIS Association to coincide with the Teaching with Spatial Technology (TwiST) Workshop for educators (June 28 – July 1).  Students learn geospatial technologies such as GIS, GPS, and remote sensing by working on a real world project.  Many STEM educators believe that junior high is one of the best times to get students interested in science, technology, and math related careers. Scholarships are available.

Grade School

The Harbor Discoveries Camp is offered by the New England Aquarium (July 9 – 24, 2012).  It is an interactive marine and environmental science program that uses geospatial technologies. Some of the activities include behind–the-scenes activities at Aquarium galleries, “excursions to Boston Harbor Islands, daily field trips to North and South Shore habitats, and an overnight experience.” Older students who have attended the camp are eligible to apply to be teachers and camp counselors. Many aquariums, museums, and nature preserves offer similar programs for students who don’t want to attend away camps.

Educators

The Teaching with Spatial Technology (TwiST) Workshop offered by the IAGT and Cayuga Community College (June 25-28, 2012) is designed to teach K-12 teachers and college faculty members in the United States how to teach and empower through geospatial technologies in the classroom. In 2011, the TwiST workshop was recognized in an Esri Special Achievements in GIS Award for  11 years of geospatial education. Scholarships are available.  Application deadline is: April 15

The “SATELLITES” (Students And Teachers Exploring Local Landscapes to Interpret The Earth from Space) K12 Summer Teacher Institute at the University of Toledo (July 9-13, 2012) is an award winning teacher education program focusing on geospatial technology and climate change and student research projects. The SATTELITES teachers have gone to the have gone to the White House Science Fair for the past two years.

Application Deadline: April 17, 2012

ESRI Kid’s Camp

Don’t forget that if you are attending the 2012 ESRI User’s Conference this year, they offer a GIS Kids Camp (July 24-26, 2012) Many summer conferences offer geospatial education programs for kids attending the conference with their parents.

If you know of any upcoming summer camps, post them in the comments section.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada along with the Audubon Society are also sponsors of the Great Backyard Bird Count which starts in February and is free for participants. Cornell Lab of Ornithology has a list of other citizen science projects that people might be interested in doing such as urban bird count, pigeon count, and migratory birds. Bird Studies Canada has citizen science projects such as The Christmas Bird Count, Canadian Migration Monitoring Network, and the nocturnal owl survey. I think these would be fantastic school, family, or even team-building exercises that involve geospatial data and the local community.

It’s a single or multi-player quiz/challenge game that asks players to explore and answer questions about the world, and will draw on National Geographic’s great multimedia resources. I know I’m going to be grabbing a copy for the VerySpatial crew, and we’ll let you know what we think!

Here’s the official trailer if you want to see a glimpse of the game in action:

Intelligent Mapping – Essentially pop ups that display data in graphical formats about the feature selected ( fun stuff like pie, bar and line charts).

Time enabled mapping – The ability to connect to time aware services and bring them into the ArcGIS.com mapping environment and have a time slider available.

And what I feel is the most significant advance, “Drag & Drop Mapping” where a text or Excel file can be dragged directly into the mapping environment to add features and their associated data.  Remember creating an Excel sheet with Latitude and Longitude fields, displaying events, and then exporting that event as a layer?  Not anymore, just drag that excel file over the map and drop it!

While the emphasis of the plenary was to enable GIS education, the undertone was that of increasing the capabilities of web mapping and the continued integration of cloud services.  The Pennsylvania State University also announced today for the first time publicly that it will be offering an open course tentatively titled “GEOG 8xx – Cloud/Server GIS“.  Enrollment for this course will be open on November 7th 2011.

Additionally, the site has available BattleApps. The BattleApps are virtual Civil War tour guides for the war or specific battles for the iPhone or iPad.  The apps are location aware and throughout the tour one could view video clips from the national park service and see locations of troops of both the North and South.  Another great example of giving old paper maps a new lease on life with digital innovation!

Fredericksburg Gets Civil War App: MyFoxDC.com

Many countries have set up citizen science watches to keep tabs on what is happening this year. According to a Charlotte news report, the 14 state Cicada Watch citizen science project had hundreds of volunteers in Mechlenberg County, NC alone this year. Other watch projects across take place across the globe. The Australian Government of Agriculture,Fisheries, and Forestry has an up to date section for “Current Locust Situation and News“. The Desert Locust Watch is produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for desert regions such as the Sudan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia,

The site also provides a series of excellent lesson plans ready for educators to use in the classroom.

I am releasing a series of 10 video podcasts over the next three months to support an NC Space Grant I received last summer. The grant, of course, is through the day job, but since it is being released under a Creative Commons license why not plaster everywhere, right?

The series’ home is at ObservingTheEarth.com which has already gone through many themes and layouts in the week and a half it has been around. After the AAG, the Observing the Earth site will be finalized and the accompanying materials for the podcasts (maps, data, lesson plans, etc) will find there way on to the site. I also plan to do an online workshop in June that pulls together the content topics that will be covered in the podcasts and more for educators (formal and informal).

Many educators are taking that idea to the classroom to do campus investigations. Now you might expect that it’s the science teacher out looking at nature, but surprise your students in English Language Arts class with an outdoors writing assignment! Realizing that not all classrooms are created equally, here are some low-tech options as well as the spiffy high-tech ones. Either have students locate specific cached items or let them explore the landscape for surprises. Anyway you do it, get creative and allow the students to explore their creativity.

Low-Tech
1. Create a map of your site with destinations. Use a hand-drawn map with destinations or use a tool like Sketch-A-Map (http://edgis.org/sketch) to create your map for students.
2. Students can create a poem or story based on the destinations on the map. Nature is an excellent way to pull more adjectives out of a student. I used a similar activity with my students in my book, Reading, Writing and Thinking around the Globe: Geospatial Technologies for English Language Arts Classroom and Beyond (www.barbareeduke.com) where students create topographic and geographic definitions for words. Visualizing vocabulary can help cement those words into a student’s personal dictionary.

High-Tech
1. Using your school’s or a set of loaner GPS units (www.gisetc.com). Set up waypoints with caches. Perhaps the students find words, phrases or starters for writing assignments. They could take photos and return to the classroom with real experiences. Don’t think that you have to have green spaces and trees to make this work. Urban explorations could be quite powerful as well! Perhaps tell the stories of graffiti or buildings changing over time.
2. Perhaps you decide to pair the GPS units with cameras (a reason for kids to use those cell phones) to create a photo essay. Just ask National Geographic if photos have a story to tell (http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/?source=NavPhoHome)!
3. Another option is to use a smart phone application. I have a GPS app on my iPhone (MotionX GPS) that integrates a picture and text with my waypoint. I can email this waypoint with the photo and text attached, and then view it in a virtual globe application like ArcGIS Explorer (http://www.esri.com/arcgisexplorer) or Google Earth (http://earth.google.com), another educational reason for kids to use that cell phone at school. Because applications like ArcGIS Explorer are equipped with a simple presentation creator, as a next step, you could combine all the stories and photos for a class-wide virtual tour.
4. For the more adventurous, you might like to check out a project called “confluencing” (www.confluence.org). This calls for a GPS unit and some planning. Check out some of my adventures with my friend, Dr. Joseph Kerski. (http://www.confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=14853). The post-adventure writing is the star here. You could take this same approach with your geocaching explorations as well, a detailed story of who, what, where, when, why and how is great practice for all those persuasive writing assignments!
The moral of the story here is: expand the borders of your classroom. Think beyond the text book and computer screen. Engage students with outdoor spatial experiences and watch their writing transform!